Everlasting Playlist

Just write the one true thing. 

A few weeks ago someone said to me, “Sometimes there’s a voice in your head that doesn’t need to be explained.” 

There are a number of voices in my head that can’t be explained, but the one that doesn’t need to be explained and wouldn’t quit this morning kept saying, “Write the one true thing. Just write the one true thing, every day. That’s it. Just write the one true thing.” Over and over and over again.  

This is the one true thing. This is the thing that broke me open again back then. But it’s also the thing that makes me feel whole. It’s the thing I keep coming back to whenever I feel the need to get back to my core. My foundation. My point of origin. 

And it’s the thing that got me back to the truest version of myself. The one who writes, and the one who runs, daily.

It’s so very simple, and so very impossible sometimes, to be that person. And it’s seemingly impossible to do them at the same time. Writing, to me, was always accompanied by two in the morning, or four in the morning, and a couple (several) drinks. Running is now the thing that gets me up at four in the morning. And keeps me far healthier. One drives me mad, one keeps me sane. They do both in turn, I suppose. But they feel like breathing. And when I suppress one or the other too long, things get out of balance, they tighten, and start to feel so very far away from the one true thing. 

“You must do the thing you think you cannot do,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.

“You must not ever stop being whimsical,” said Mary Oliver. 

“And you must write the one true thing,” said the voice in my head that need not be explained.

That’s it.

“Wild Geese” -Mary Oliver

I thought of you today. Wrote your name name on a notepad, in the margins.

I got that feeling again. 

Blue backpack. Pictures of shoes. 

Pictures of going.

Last I can pinpoint this feeling was February 2014. The good kind. The chest-spilling, filling up again kind.  

I had found an Airbnb in Cumming and thought... I’d like to go live on a horse ranch in rural Georgia for a while, be alone. And so I did. Completely off the grid and free to go anywhere, everywhere. I started a new chapter. Resuming my life without you in the only way I knew how to live it -- to go, to search. 

I got a little lost along the way, but looking back there’s nothing like the feeling of realizing how all these dots connected. All those steps and missteps and how everything now comes full circle on April 17. 

I know enough now to always pay attention to the notes in the margins. It’s where the gut lives. It’s that reminder, that note to self, to go, to do, to come back to. 

"You must do the thing you think you cannot do." -Eleanor Roosevelt

An unknown area code lit my phone as I walked the halls of Kaplan Hospice House. Not normally one to pick up unknown numbers, I stared blankly at the 404 for a few moments before answering.

“Hi, Erin. This is Rick from CNN in Atlanta.”

http://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2012/12/04/dnt-ma-flash-mob-for-cancer-patient.whdh

Little did I know then, Atlanta is where I would resume my life one year later. Little did I know then just how well this flash-mob-on-a-napkin story would illustrate my mom’s impact for the friends I’d not yet met, who had not met my mom.

Little did I know.

Four Decembers later, reminiscing over wine in a friend’s living room, she leaned back and shared, “I really feel like I know your mom. The way you remember her? I feel like I know her. Were she to walk through the door right now -- ‘Hey, Eileen!’”

She then proceeded to name each one of “our people,” musing on how my mom might relate. And she was spot on. She got my mom. She knew her as closely as she could know her, through me.

This thing that I was doing, this way of remembering her, it was resonating. A friend who had never met my mom brought her effortlessly back into the room with that spot on description. Four years after my mom had stood at that window, at Mass General, looking out on a life well-lived. Looking out on -- “my people,” as she said.

A lot has happened in the four years since then. 

“If you don’t want to be the bad guy, I will,” said Rosebud. 

While she was as sweet as her name implied, Rosebud was a lion when it came to her patients. The revolving door of visitors was becoming too much for my mom, and if we felt badly saying so -- Rosebud had no problem playing gatekeeper. 

And so it was, that Rosebud planted the seed. 

After days of looking out that window over Ebersol Field and the Charles River... the Charles... BU on one side, Harvard the other... how many trips my parents had made up and down either side of that river to see Brian and me. The last card my mom ever mailed me was a painting of the Charles River. The last month I’d left up on my office calendar, November 2012, was a photo of a rower on the Charles River. “This side or the other.”   

My dad looked down over Ebersol and wondered if anyone had done this before. It seemed an obvious solution. Instead of visitors in the room, why not visitors on the field? My mom was resting so he grabbed a pen and continued his train of thought on a napkin, scribbling out the details on both sides before handing it over to me. 

A great idea in theory. But the reality of it coming together outside the walls of this room was another thing altogether. When? How? What if...?

We put the cocktail napkin scribbling on the shelf for the next few days. Thanksgiving came and went. My dad was growing ever more exhausted as messenger to the outside world. Phone calls, text messages, visits... everyone (rightly) wanting to know what was going on and how could they help. My mom had always been relatively private, our family was relatively private -- social, but private -- and so most people were just finding out about the gravity of her condition now. 

With all due expedience I fired off a mass email Saturday after Thanksgiving. Efficient. But Facebook was more efficient. Around 10pm Saturday night I finally logged onto Facebook, crafted a quick update, cringed and clicked:

Later that night, a text from my brother: She said yes. The next morning Brian and Corie shared their engagement with my mom, minutes before the surprise out the window. 

Sunday November 25, 2012 around noon, we watched, anxiously, from the window, wondering if the idea on the paper napkin would play out smoothly or would be poorly-timed. Well-received by my mom or not. Well-attended by family and friends or not. And...

“What can be explained is not poetry.” -Yeats

I should start by saying, I feel very lucky.

That the most frequent buzzing on my phone (especially during election season) is a group text of 10 of us... not just high school friends, or middle school friends... but some of us in this group go as far back as first grade. A motley, classic-rock-loving crew referenced here in Song 109, Tiny Dancer, it just doesn’t get much better than the people I grew up with.

Blue jean baby, L.A. lady, seamstress for the band Pretty eyed, pirate smile, you'll marry a music man

And of that group...  Miss Jessica is my music wo-man.

She’s much more than that, but the constant and loudest chord between us has always been music. A through-line which extends as far back as middle school when we were in, yes, band together... continuing through high school... which truly speaks to our shared tenacity because committing to a plume on your head for four years requires a real -- I genuinely do not care what other people think -- kind of flair. 

She played the flute. 

I played the sax. 

We owned it.

(And we made it through high school.)

The summer after graduation -- a Dave Matthews concert. Where the sky soaked our hair in the open lawn and where we had a big, deep, stretching parking lot conversation about what would become of us all when we went off to college. What would become of us at all? Never expecting the dreaded “c” -- the curveball no one expects -- would become a reality for Jessica by our sophomore year.

As not only a cancer survivor, but simply as a person in the world, she just gets it. Whatever IT is. Whatever it is we’re all doing here. She gets it. Supremely. Deeply. Unequivocally.

She is my music friend, but she is also my intrepid, spontaneous, WILL TRAVEL for music friend...

New York 2009 -- Phoenix played a summer concert in Central Park. She decided that morning she’d make an impromptu drive from Boston to visit. We went without tickets. We winged it. It worked out. Famously. As it always does.

And it rained. Again.

Atlanta, May 2014 -- Shaky Knees music festival. Just weeks prior, on Marathon Monday, Jess had resolved to book a flight and come visit. One week later she bought the ticket. Two weeks later she was in Atlanta.

And it rained. Again. As it always does. (It absolutely poured this time.)

But nonetheless, Jess and I had a very Almost Famous weekend at Shaky Knees.

We drank in Spoon and The National side stage.

Bumped into friends.

Found the best concert-goer.

And of course, we “won the party” in true Eileen fashion.

(And scored Waffle House hats for her daughters. Everybody won.)

Not only is Jessica my intrepid, spontaneous, will travel for music friend -- she’s the friend who writes emails like this one -- an ever so subtle nudge to keep going with the blog, after my one-a-day posts began to sputter.  “SO, long story long, I wanted to share this clip with you because it just reminded me of a really beautiful way to think of Eileen.”

The takeaway from Thich was...

“It’s like a cloud in the sky. When the cloud is no longer in the sky, it doesn’t mean the cloud has died. Your beloved cloud might have become the rain, calling on you, “Darling! Darling! Don’t you see me in my new form?”

On the second day of Shaky Knees, in between the rain, we stood atop a balcony under a mess of clouds and got to talking about the lives you don’t choose, or that you choose to walk away from, and the lives that choose you instead. Jess is an oncology nurse now at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, and felt it was a calling. But if she’d never gotten sick, she lamented, she would have pursued a career in music. Standing atop that balcony... looking out at the life she didn’t choose.

But don’t you see? You did go into music, my dear.

“Darling! Darling! Don’t you see me in my new form?”

People choose their professions for all sorts of reasons, but I believe the subtext in the job description of an oncology nurse is to teach people how to sing in the rain.

We never once played my mom’s iPod while at Mass General, where there was already so much music in that room. Nurse Jane, Rosebud, Sharon... every nurse who waltzed in singing her own song echoes through our memories still. “Puuuhhrrrrfect! Puuuhhhhrrrrrrrrfect!” my dad, my brother and I would sing in unison, miming Nurse Sharon’s upbeat refrain each time she arranged my mom’s pillows just so.

Oncology nurses are a special breed of magic. And you, my dear, are a walking, breathing case study in how to see the silver lining. In, yes...  The Art of Singing in the Rain.

Because at the end of the day -- as we well know from our life experiences and concert experiences -- there is always music in the rain.

***

We ended Shaky Knees weekend sipping mimosas under the sun in Sprice’s yard on Sunday. Mother’s Day. All three of us touched by cancer. Sprice and I who have lost our moms, and Jessica who has survived it. Two un-mothered women and a mother of two children. (And I am witnessing Jessica becoming the kind of mother my mother was.) Maybe that’s why she’s such a conduit to all things Eileen now.

After a good rain, Sprice’s yard comes alive in a wash of bright, bursting, brilliant greens. Tangled vines creep up drainpipes and crawl through fences. The big willow tree seems to grow in size. Rose bushes come out of hiding, the butterfly bush attracts its old visitors and bees dance from flower to flower while the horses graze in an emerald pasture.

Everything operates on a higher frequency here -- buzzing, palpable energy -- the yard breathes through every open door and window into the house where ladybugs have made a home in every room. It is Great Expectations. Sprice’s home is one of the most healing environments I have ever known. It’s where I got my water after my mom passed away.

Jess came back down to Atlanta this May and we stopped over Sprice’s for a visit. After we left, Sprice texted me to say: Isn’t it always magical when Jessica is here?

I love this sentiment... because Jess has only been to Sprice’s twice.

And yes, it always is.

It’s easy to witness the magic and observe life after the rain at Sprice’s, where everything is alive and green and Oz-like and signs of my mom are everywhere. The “moments of glittering mica” are less easy to observe in less dramatic settings... like sitting in traffic on an endlessly grey stretch of highway in Massachusetts. Unless you have someone tapping you on the shoulder to point out the signs.

Of all the concerts we’ve seen, of all the rain we’ve endured, by far our best concert experience came July 30th of this year, back home in MA, the granddaddy of all concerts: COLDPLAY. Church. My first Coldplay concert, a religious experience and portal to my mom. Coldplay was the last concert my mom saw (in person) on July 29, 2012. But boy was she ever present at this one. And she just couldn’t wait...

On the way there, sitting in traffic... Jess’s husband tapped me on the shoulder from the back seat without saying a word, and pointed straight ahead: 

(A vehicle as her vehicle.) Of all the cars in Massachusetts...

And well before the concert, in the midst of writing this post and trying to arrive at my point -- I had come to the realization that every time Jessica and I see a concert together, it rains. Without a drop of rain in the forecast I thought surely if it rains on Coldplay this would be a clear sign of Eileen.

So there we sat. Another concert under another very expectant-looking sky. Another big, deep, stretching parking lot conversation. My dad was off chatting with Jess’s husband while she and I sat in flimsy folding chairs drinking beers, discussing serendipity and looking out at the sun peeking through clouds when all of a sudden, out of the blue...

Rain.

My mom, my water.

She’d be damned if she missed a Coldplay concert.

And she wasn’t done there. She has to win the party, after all. 

So at the end of the concert, in sync with the brilliant fireworks display and the rousing finale and the now signature wristbands lighting the crowd up like fireflies, came the pitter patter of rain falling on us once more.

I smiled and looked up at the cloudless sky as raindrops and tears streamed down my face. 

“Darling! Darling! Don’t you see me in my new form?” 

***

What lights you up?

How do you get your water?

Coldplay. Good friends. This blog. My mom’s music and the music that is my mom’s spirit in the perfectly-timed, out-of-the-blue rain. Tenacious. Steadfast. Resolute. A reminder of the mantra she kept in her heart, and on a magnet... found among the things my dad collected from her classroom in 2014:

She is alive and well in all the little serendipities of my life; she is the well from which I grew; and it turns out, sometimes roses do grow from the cracks in the parking lot too.

Her art was her attitude.

My curiosity as to where the soul goes once it evaporates from the body is a bottomless well. And I keep dipping the bucket, again, and again, and again. 

Sometimes, the bucket comes up full at a time when you need it most, like when I stumbled across this 2010 email from my mom, a nurturing nudge, from the cloud.

“Carry on my girl!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Love youxoxoxoxoox”

 The road to Rice

And then one day... you’re simply running -- one foot in front of the other -- toward something, not away from -- aware of it all. Breathing in and out. The light meets you right where you are, in the middle of a street that’s yours alone, on those double yellow lines leading everywhere. 

So here we are. So many days after I started out on my “131-day journey” to remember her life. So many days after so many things. Here we are.

And here we go again.

With clear eyes, a free spirit and a heart broken open.

Grateful for what got me here.