So many forms of Impermanence

My brother Alex got married this weekend. It was a Halloween wedding, resplendent with major crafting done by my now sister-in-law, Patty, and many images of love mixed with impermanence. Bride and Groom skeletons, for instance, held up pumpkins with their names carved out, and a ghoulish butler invited everyone into the reception room.


Witches, goblins, zombies and ghosts attended the wedding, along with, of course, living costumed creatures: Mr and Mrs Potato Head, Masquerading Bridesmaid (that was me), a few devils and belly dancers. Some kind of goliath, a few goths and a secret detective who gave his ID away right away. One baby pumpkin, and so on. But the first list - witches, goblins, ghosts and zombies - struck me in particular because for my brother, sister-in-law and me, another set of ghosts attended the wedding: Alex's and my dead parents, Michael and Tricia. Patty, my sister-in-law, suggested that they place a white rose on each chair for our parents in the front row during the ceremony - and so in the front row at the ceremony (attended by other ghosts, goblins and ghouls) there lay their ghostly traces. Later, I carried the white roses with me everywhere - they sat at Dylan's and my dinner table, and visited the DJ table where Dylan made sure plenty of Thriller and other celebratory scary music was played to dance to. Now they are home with me, where I will dry them and add them to my Dio de las Muertos shrine.

Everywhere I went this weekend, I saw skeletons and skulls, and not just in costumes, in places I wouldn't expect: in art at the Milwaukee Art Museum, on the streets imbedded in concrete. Impermanence, sometimes in a joyful way, other times in complete sadness that overwhelmed me and threatened my careful makeup job, reared its head completely this weekend. Ostensibly we say that the wedding was Halloween themed because Patty is a Mortician - technically, a County Examiner - with a license plate "Morticia" and Halloween stuff all over their house any time of the year. But for me, the theme was perfect and quite healing, actually, considering how much death Alex and I have lived through in our family: our parents, all of our grandparents and great aunts and uncles, and a godparent all gone by our twenties. What better way to invite our whole family - not ever as big as Patty's, but once more sizeable than now - than to invite the dead as well.

And not just the kindly ghosts, but the haunters, spooks and zombies, too.

To invite impermanence itself to one's wedding is to do a brave act of acknowledging this short life. During his speech at the reception, Alex spoke of how our mother had cried for a month after our father's death. Then, he admitted, he thought to himself "Just get on with it," but now that he has so much to lose - Tyler, his son, and Patty, his wife to name the big ones - he understands her grief so much more.

To love is to know what it is to lose, to lose is to know what it is to love. A risk. Life is a risk.
A Halloween wedding acknowledges this. I thank them both more heartily than they could ever imagine for not only throwing the most fun wedding ever, full of bagpipes and dancing sausages and moustache props, but also for letting the sometimes-difficult truth of our existence dance in its skeletal form alongside our joy and laughter.

The Joy in Heartache

"three sisters" from albuquerque botanical gardens, february 2010

I rush through the last of the first chapter of John Thorndike's The Last of His Mind, his memoir about his father's experience with Alzheimer's and John's time caring for him, and hurry out the door of the coffee shop to come home to my laptop and write. The feeling is intense - joyful and piercing - that I want to write so much about how mixed pure pain is - not anxiety, not suffering - but the pure stuff, like heartache.

Where did this come from? Partway through reading the chapter, a coffeehouse buddy asked me what I was reading when I took a break to take a deep breath, looking up for the first time in a dozen pages. She asked about if my family had Alzheimer's in it, mentioning that her family doesn't, her mom is still doing fine in her mid-80's. "Nope. My family just dies young," which is only partially true, but enough partial to be pretty alarming. "50/60's of heart disease or related, then 80's of what's called natural causes but is more like heartache." She nods. "Your family has unraveling DNA." Yes, I nod. That sounds right.

I take the break to go check on various online things - email, Facebook, texts, messages, and there find a response from my one, currently official (though there's one other unofficial and one about to become official this October) sister-in-law. She agrees with me that sleeping in, which was what my post was about, is great, then says that she and I should go and get a late breakfast sometime next week, when others are at work and she and I are free because of our odd schedules. Somehow going from the isolation of caring for one's father who is isolated from himself with Alzheimer's to such easy conviviality made my heartache. I made the date, then set back to reading.

Throughout the rest of the chapter, though, my previous experience of a sister-in-law haunted me. Nora is my sister-in-law through me marrying her brother, Dylan; this other sister-in-law (now divorced) was the wife of my brother David. Nothing about my relationship with my first sister-in-law was ever easy, and that is not an overexaggeration. We struggled with ourselves at the time, trying to find autonomy in situations of great suffering and pain, both, and also with each other. There was great healing to be found in all of it, on both sides, but also a lot of pain, and a lot of damage. As soon as I had reason to distance myself, I did, and stayed away from relating to her, but not after a few years of very difficult, heart-breaking strained intimacy. I read about how Thorndike feels closer to his father now that his father has lost so much of his order, formality, and has become vulnerable, and I wonder what it takes for some situations to work - because relating to Nora is so easy, so straight-forward (as is to my two other "sister-outlaws" as I call them, Melissa and Patty). It doesn't feel like work at all, even when there is work to do. And that first relationship with a sister-in-law I don't think ever didn't feel like work.

My heart aches for that kind of difference, for how family simply refuses to be constructed, or can be constructed but also encapsulate suffering alongside joy. The gratitude bursts out of me in waves, and when it ebbs, sadness flows freely. The joy and heartache intermingle and the words beg to burst out onto the page. So here they are, and here I am, and here all of these sisters tossed together are. Let us find the joy in the heartache, not eliminate the heartache - the piercing is a reward far greater than constant smiles.