Tag: family

AFTER THEY ARE GONE

AFTER THEY ARE GONE

I felt my Mom beside me today. There she was…her presence, love and support right beside me as I walked down the gangway to board my plane. She died 16 years ago and yet there she was. Sudden tears, hot with longing and gratitude, puddled in my eyes. I don’t know what those moments are…visitations? The continuing journey of grief? Both? I’ll try to unpack this to get to the source or cause…here goes…. 

Last night I got to do a concert in NY with my most favourite musicians in the world. Top drawer and well over a decade’s worth of making music together…not nearly often enough but a privilege for me every time we are together.  So, there’s music…the spiritual discipline of it, the beauty, the literal and metaphoric harmony. The physicality, the vibrations. Also, as it was a new show, the pressure and focus of it…the aspiration that it will work, that I won’t fuck up and that the lyrics I inadvertently make up when I do fuck up, make sense. The joyful process and exertion of prepping for a show is also a kind of hurdle. Mom liked to say, “When the hurdles come, keep hurdling.”  Words to live by and boy, did she. All to say…for atleast two days leading up to a gig like that I’m living in an altered state…half in the world, half in rehearsal. The sensation is what I imagine it would feel like to be stuffed into a canon.  The launch of this new show went well last night I’m thrilled to report and the ensuing wash of relief and gratitude moved me to another kind of altered state…of breathing again. Early out this morning on 4 hours sleep…so exhaustion perhaps lets one’s guard down whilst in that state of re-entering “normal” life.

Walking down the gangway, suspended mid air between last night and the day ahead, I felt her. I felt the seeds of art she had taught me when she would move back the living room furniture, crank up the stereo and we would dance together, spinning in delight, my beautiful Mother and five year old me.   When she had set up a rehearsal space for me again in the living room before I was to sing at ten years old at the Tokyo American Club. It mattered. The message from her to me was that I mattered. I felt that all the calls she had made to make it possible for me to have childhood opportunities to perform serially under the auspices of a professional theatrical company, Toho, in Tokyo where I was raised…calls and effort that had created an apprenticeship throughout my childhood that in turn had led to the my being able to hurdle without falling last night.  I wanted and want to tell her, to thank her, to let her know that now at 70 I am reaping the benefits of her gifts as a Mother, my mother.  Did I conjure her? Was she there hearing me? I pray so.

Two other times of late, I’ve had a moment.  She is gone now but years ago my long-term pal Heather and I had for over a decade shared a dream to again live in NY and, eventually, for a few years we did. Sometimes together and then in our own flats. It was heaven. We had big girl playdates galore in the city…taking in plays, exhibits and concerts, walking through the fairyland of snow blizzards down the middle of Fifth Avenue, staying up late, sharing friends and life overlaps. It was rich and meaningful and its own special miracle. As I came out of my NYC hotel last week a blast of air whooshed by me and suddenly it was as if Heather was on my arm again, walking the way we would together.  Tangible joy.  She had a cluster of very close friends and each has reported over the years similar “Heather moments”. Does she fly by or is it just that our love for her, cut short by an early death ran so deep that it continues to find ways to express itself?

This last…well, you decide. My partner Patrick and I had the distinct privilege of having been introduced to the remarkable Irish scholar, Manchan Magan. He was an angel on the earth who led a unique life… travelled the world as a seeker living variously in Himalayan huts, with cave dwellers in Thailand, with a plethora of native tribes throughout the Americas…always finding connections in language back to his native Gaelic. His ideas were vibrant and overflowing with joy. He recounted tales at some point of being so happy at age three to sit in his familial garden, talking to the grass in kinship…rejoicing that he too was sustained by a harmonious source. Tragically this magical, Gaelic scholar…suffered a horrid and aggressive cancer and died, with so much more to give, at 55. Damn. A few days before he passed, he kindly wrote thanking me for being a “supporter and guardian.” That word “guardian” lingered in my mind and I wondered what it meant? What was the task he had set me to? 

Ten days after he died, I bolted awake at 4am with Manchan prominently in mind.  “Why?”, I wondered but then his word “Guardian” fueled a desire to pray for him. And so I did, for his continued journey and purpose…along those lines, to the best of my ability.  After a while, things calmed and some funny sounding words came to me …Gaelic, I presumed. Feeling I would not remember them come morning, I asked Chat GPT what they or words sounding like them, meant in Gaelic?  The response was, “May you be well. Goodbye, little one.” Then the voice continued in English…”Live in the Knowing. I am living in the Knowing.” 

Whose to say? All I know is that these moments organically fold into a continuum of memories.  If indeed these are visitations, I pray that once I’m on the other side, my soul can visit and impart some comforting presence just as I have been, imagined or otherwise, companioned by people I have known and loved and will always love. Wouldn’t that be fun! Atleast I promise I’ll try.

Virginia Calling

My dog got hit by a car a few years back. She survived, mercifully with only a broken leg to show for the misadventure but it meant that rather than fly home to Colorado from the east coast, we would need to drive. I had the time, it was summer…so, off we set. Our route took us through the stunning, ancient hills of Virginia and West Virginia, land of my matriarchal ancestors. Looking at those vistas, I remember some internal switch being involuntarily flipped that cued a calling to return to those roots. Who knows why? Over the course of my life, I had only been in those parts for a handful of scattered weeks but then again, I had grown up under my Mother’s roof and for as much as her life had evolved beyond West Virginia, there was a part of her that always remained deeply grounded in those sensibilities. She could as easily wear an haute couture, gold lamé gown dripping in jewels as she could smack the shit out of an errant rattler in the backyard with the flat side of a shovel.

Recently, when an offer came in to do a movie in Virginia, I jumped at the chance to return. So here I have been this last summer week, in these unfamiliar, familiar parts. As that flipped switch had harbingered, I have been having some kind of serious series of woo woo moments since arriving.  For one thing, the vegetation is much of what Mom had duplicated in my sister’s and my Tokyo childhood gardens …gardenias, camellias, lilacs, azaleas…all of which are in bloom now.  Childhood aromas abound.  The decor in the house the film company has me staying in, as well as the residence in which we’ve been filming, eerily repeat choices of Mom’s/my guess is my grandmother Mamaw’s, as well.  Silver trays, tassels on knobs, worn tapestry carpets, silver candle sticks, sea shell and drift wood collections, wicker backed chairs, etched glass bowls, cut crystal vases, arrangements of dried pussy willow stems and peacock feathers. Shades variously of blue gray, taupes and muted coral on the walls and linen, lots of monogrammed linen. These are each elements of décor I have adopted into my own homes but had heretofore never particularly identified them as hand me down influences from my matriarchs.  Then…oddly…there are Asian accents as well. Massive peony patterned porcelain jars. Blue and white rice jars. The Asia connection continues as my driver, in this teeny tiny Virginia hamlet is of all things, Japanese.  So random…then again not? The Spirits are working some kind of wicked pull to my past and to my ancestors and I’d be lying to say I am not a little comforted by it all.  Speaks somehow to the quantum interconnectedness between past present and future… All as being one.

Inevitably somewhere in the day this reverie gets interrupted by yet another punch from the news.  You know, those government, blow up punches. The eradication and/or defunding of the EPA, Department of Education, NIH, PBS, NPR, vaccine and cancer research, USAID, etc… Tragically, the list goes on. My sense of identity as an American, cracks anew. I mean what does it mean to be an American anymore? We certainly do not stand today for any of the values my generation was raised to emulate. The path ahead as citizen again becomes fraught, unstable. Thus frozen but in the newfound comfort of Virginia, I turn willingly, to the past. As if to reassure myself that because I, we, have a past we indeed do have a future.

In an attempt to re-root in the vanishing America I love, I’ve taken to wading through the Constitution and have found solace.  It spells out clear directives and duties of each branch of government, displays evolving humanity, compassion, lawful procedure, separation of powers, separation of church and state. Thus re-rooted, when yet another flagrant action of total disregard for our Constitution is perpetrated, it is easier to undo my ingrained trust of government, call out the wrong, reset the trajectory if only mentally and realign with my, with our ancestors’ wisdom. I breathe in the Virginia aromas anew and listen for life cues. Whilst I wait…I imagine I feel or perhaps even feel an embrace from the past encouraging me and all of us onwards.