Devotion (12 page)

Writers often say that the hardest part of writing isn’t the writing itself; it’s the sitting down to write. The same is true of yoga, meditation, and prayer. The sitting down, the making space. The
doing
. It sounds so simple, doesn’t it? Unroll the mat. Sit cross-legged on the floor.
Just do it.
Close your eyes and express a silent need, a wish, a moment of gratitude. What’s so hard about that? Except—it is hard. The usual distractions—the clutter and piles of life—are suddenly, unusually enticing. The worst of it, I’ve come to realize, is that the thing that stops me—the shadow that casts a cold darkness across the best of my intentions—isn’t the puppy, the e-mail, the UPS truck, the school conference, the phone, the laundry, the to-do lists. It’s
me
that stops me.
Things get stuck
, the osteopath once said with a shrug. He gestured to the area where the neck meets the head. The place where the body ends and the mind begins.
Things get stuck.
It sounded so simple when he said it. It’s me, and the things that are stuck. Standing in my way.

We don’t get a lot of unexpected visitors. Our driveway is a quarter of a mile long, and cars don’t turn into it accidentally. Every once in a while, though, an unfamiliar vehicle pulls up to the
house. If I’m home alone, I tend to get a little nervous. I hold the phone in one hand, ready to call 911 as I peer out the window.

Recently, a car full of young men dressed in black suits and white shirts drove up to the house on a Sunday morning. They didn’t look like ax murderers. An older woman wearing a tweed skirt and Shetland sweater was with them; she was the one who knocked on our front door.

“Michael! It’s the Seventh Day Adventists!” I yelled. I didn’t like dealing with proselytizers. I never knew what to say.
We’re all set. No thanks—really.

Michael walked outside, the puppy at his heels. He actually liked engaging these people. I watched through the window as he chatted with the woman. What could they possibly be discussing? She handed him some sort of pamphlet, then waved good-bye.

“We talked about the dog,” Michael said when he came back in. “She didn’t want to talk about religion. She wanted to give me this. Oh, and they weren’t Seventh Day Adventists.”

“Well, what were they?”

“I’m not sure. Witnesses, I think.”

Michael had only taken the pamphlet to be polite. He tossed it into the recycling bin. I fished it out. The pamphlet was titled
Would You Like to Know the Truth?
Inside was a list of questions:

I definitely wanted to know the truth. I glanced through the pamphlet, which also contained photographs: a bandaged child, a graveyard, a woman clutching a prayer book to her chest.
How can I pray and be heard by God?
This question in particular interested me. According to the pamphlet, the Bible—this would be the New Testament—teaches that we must not say the same things over and over again in our prayers. If we want God to listen, we must pray in the way that he approves. To do that, we need to learn what God’s will is and then pray accordingly.

The pamphlet cited Matthew 6:7, which I promptly looked up. After all, I was an equal-opportunity seeker of wisdom. What did I care where it came from?
And when you pray, you shall not be like the hypocrites. For they love to stand praying in synagogues
(ouch!)
and on the corners of the streets, so that they may be seen by men. Assuredly, I say to you, they have their reward.
(Double ouch!)
But you, when you pray, go into your room, and when you have shut the door, pray to your Father, who is in the secret place; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you openly.

I liked the idea of prayer as something private and fluid. I thought of the High Holiday services of my youth. The ladies in their new outfits, the men squirming uncomfortably. The children playing outside as the adults did their duty. Then I thought about my own yoga practice, and the way, sometimes, the phrase from that old Dunkin’ Donuts commercial would pop into my head as I began my routine sun salutations: Time to make the donuts, I would think as I bent forward, then jumped back. Time to make the donuts.

But maybe there was good reason for the routine—for repeating the same gestures, the same words, again and again. As my father wrapped his tefillin around and around his arm, the familiar action was a meditative one, a preparation for prayer. Could
he have gotten there without it? When I unroll my yoga mat and place my hands in
namaste
, I may be making the donuts, but I am also performing a ritual that allows me to enter a contemplative place—a place in which I might come upon something wordless and profound. Maybe the rituals are a doorway to prayer. But I spent most of my life confusing them with prayer itself.

I didn’t know how to pray. I knew the Hebrew words and melodies of my childhood—I could recite the entire siddur by heart—but I didn’t know what any of it meant. Despite my yeshiva education, the language was elusive to me. Oh, I could pick up a few words here and there.
Melech
meant “king.”
Olam
meant “world.” But basically, it was gone. How could I have gone from fluent to nothing? Perhaps Hebrew itself was a
samskara
. Perhaps one day, while in a deep yoga pose, it would all come flooding back.

But honestly, I was glad I no longer understood. Even in English translation, the prayers themselves disturbed me. I didn’t want to plead with God, or bargain with him, or flatter him. I wanted to access him. To find a way to speak to him without feeling ridiculous. When I was in shul, I sang, and the singing itself stirred something within me: memory, intense longing. If nothing else, it was a deep connection to the past. But it didn’t feel like prayer—or at least, what I hoped prayer might feel like.

Each day, I kept making the donuts. It wasn’t simply the yoga practice, the attempts to meditate, the reading and thinking and
enforced daily solitude. By doing each of these things, I was creating an environment, I hoped, in which I might continue to explore and deepen my perception. “The great spirits of religious traditions do not solve all questions but live
in
the questions, and return to them again and again, not as a circle returns, but as an ascending spiral comes to the same place, each time at a higher level,” writes Rabbi David Wolpe. Each day, when I unrolled my mat, opened a book, let the phone ring, sat still instead of jumping up and reacting to whatever was going on in my mind, I was attempting exactly that: a return to the questions.

Some days were harder than others. At times, I was convinced that I had made a huge mistake, delving this intensely into spiritual matters. Was I becoming one of those earnest, humorless people? Who did I think I was, anyway? I was a
novelist
. If I was good at anything, it was at making things up. Writing fiction—following the line of words, as Annie Dillard once put it—was the closest thing I had ever known to an act of faith. I kept moving in small steps, both forward and back. With each step, I had no certainty that there would be ground beneath me.

But on rare occasions, I felt something else. Something different. It was a sense, not of presence, but of oneness. There was no difference between
me
and
it
—nothing separating me from the invisible fabric that made up everything around me. When this happened, it did not feel revelatory. There were no violins, no exploding lights. There was nothing epiphanic, orgiastic, ecstatic, about it. It was a very quiet sense of
knowing
. The words accompanying this knowledge did not strike me as ridiculous. They did not strike me as anything at all, but rather, emerged from a place beyond self-consciousness.
Please allow my heart to open to all that is.

In Connecticut, on our hilltop, life was quiet. Gone were the city sounds: the sirens, hisses, street fights, car alarms, the teeming, throbbing, ceaseless pulse of life. Our pace slowed. A different kind of pulse surrounded us now. I noticed the reddish hue of bare tree branches as they began to bud; the silvery frost at dawn. Baby chipmunks darted into the cracks under our front steps. We were surrounded by crickets, field mice, bats, hawks, frogs from the pond across the way. A gray fox roamed our meadow. There were reports of a bear. At night, coyotes howled in the distance.

Suddenly, there were enough—more than enough!—hours in the day. There was no traffic. It took exactly sixteen minutes to drive Jacob to school. No more, no less, barring the unforeseen event of being stuck behind a tractor pulling hay. It took nine minutes to get to the market, eleven minutes to the little French bakery. The thriving metropolis of Great Barrington, Massachusetts, was precisely an hour, door-to-door. It was quiet, all right. So quiet that we could hear the sound of a truck straining uphill a mile away.

In the silence, something shifted. I had left a certain kind of anxiety behind, back in the city. The urban life I had loved for so long—the constant motion, the sense that there was always something exciting happening somewhere—that life had turned on me, once I became a mother. (Or perhaps once my child became so sick. The two events—new motherhood, the near-loss of Jacob—are grafted together in my mind so that it is impos
sible to think of one without the other.) In the country, I stopped being a person who, in the words of Sylvia Boorstein,
startles easily
. I grew calmer, but beneath that calm was a deep well of loneliness I hadn’t known was there. No wonder I had been running as hard and as fast as I could! Anxiety was my fuel. When I stopped, it was all waiting for me: fear, anger, grief, despair, and that terrible, terrible loneliness. What was it about? I was hardly alone. I loved my husband and son. I had great friends, colleagues, students. In the quiet, in the extra hours, I was forced to ask the question, and to listen carefully to the answer: I was lonely for myself.

Who was I, and what did I want for the second half of my life? I mean, I was in the middle of life, the middle of midlife, the middle of a midlife crisis. I had been shaped by choices and decisions, not all of them conscious. I had turned left instead of right; had taken (or not taken) the trip, the flight, the challenge, the chance. Everything I had ever done had led me here—and while here wasn’t a bad place at all, it also wasn’t enough. Some essential piece of me was missing, and in the quiet of the country I had an opportunity to figure out what, exactly, that missing piece was.

Lacuna (manuscripts): a missing piece of text

Lacuna (music): an extended silence in a piece of music

Lacuna (linguistics): a lexical gap in a language

Lacuna (law): the lack of law or of a legal source addressing a situation

Lacuna (histology): a small space containing an osteocyte in bone

Lacuna (geology): a large gap in the stratigraphic record

Lacunar amnesia (psychology): amnesia about a specific event

Petrovsky lacuna (mathematics): a region where the fundamental solution of a differential equation vanishes

Some of my best conversations with Jacob take place in the car. When the radio is off, the DVD screen tucked away, in the silence the car transforms from a suburban vehicle into a sanctuary. The other day, we were driving home from school, and all of a sudden, Jacob piped up from the back seat: “How do we know we’re not dreaming right now?” The idea that we might be dreaming frightened him. He wanted to know what was real. I know he feels great comfort in anything quantifiable: maps, lists, facts, figures. He also thinks a lot about death.
Maybe when we die it feels like dreaming.
Despite evidence to the contrary, he thinks that only very old people die. That life has an expiration date, like his squeezable yogurts. Eighty, he thinks. Or better yet, ninety or one hundred. Comfortably far off for everyone he knows and loves.

Jacob has been coming up with more of these questions lately—perhaps because he has some awareness that I’ve been thinking about them too. What he doesn’t know is that he’s the beating heart of my journey. That, had he not been born, I might never have felt this need to explore my intermittent feelings of
emptiness and loss. There was always some sort of shiny distraction. Always a way of quieting the voice that exhorted me to think harder, delve deeper. And besides, things were pretty good, particularly when I considered where I had come from; as the poet Jane Kenyon once wrote, “It might have been otherwise.”

I had lived most of my adult life thinking that way:
I got out of bed / on two strong legs. / It might have been / otherwise.
But becoming a mother made me greedy. I wanted more than the awareness of my own good fortune—the day, each breath, the quiet, the health of my loved ones, my own two strong legs. I was looking beyond the horizon of my own gratitude—and make no mistake about it, I was grateful. But I knew that past that horizon was a drop, a free fall. There was much that I didn’t remember. So much that I had left behind. I couldn’t teach my son to be unafraid of his lacunae if I wasn’t willing to sit in the deepest hollows of my own.

Is it ever right to give up on a person? To decide—if indeed, it amounts to a decision—that a relationship is beyond hope? What would it take, to arrive at such a place? And, having arrived at such a place, what then? In the Yom Kippur service during the Ashamnu, the ritual recitation of communal sins, among the sins of committing slander, adultery, covetousness, there is this:
for the sin of succumbing to dismay.

To succumb to dismay. It had never seemed like much of a sin, but it did seem that there might be a high price for succumb
ing. Shortly after Michael and I decided to move from Brooklyn to Connecticut, he turned to me one afternoon and asked what I was going to do about my mother. It had been a year since I’d seen her. I had stopped speaking to her during Jacob’s illness. It was a horrible choice, but not a difficult one:
my mother or my child
.

It shouldn’t have surprised me that it had come to this. I had spent years—my whole life, really—trying to make peace with my mother. She was at war with the world, but with no one so much as me. My very existence seemed an affront and disappointment to her. Even as a child, I felt myself shrink in her presence, trying to make myself invisible so that her rage might pass over me. As I grew up, I developed the protective mechanism of forgetting. I forgot the pain she caused me until I felt it again—and again.

When Jacob had become ill, my mother dismissed his illness too. She thought I was exaggerating—that it was no big deal. She screamed that I wasn’t paying attention to
her
. She told me I’d better watch out or my marriage would fall apart, because Michael and I seemed depressed. Finally I walked away. I couldn’t be Jacob’s mother and her daughter at the same time. I had written my mother a note when Jacob seemed to be recovering, and had called her on the morning of the attacks on the World Trade Center. But that had been the extent of our contact. She had called, faxed, e-mailed, FedExed, and otherwise tried to get hold of me. But Jacob’s illness had taken me apart and put me back together. My heart had grown tougher, more resilient. Life was too short, I told myself. But I hadn’t succumbed—not totally. I still had a glimmer of hope. Maybe things could be different. Maybe later.

But now, later was upon us. We were moving to the country. If I didn’t reach out to my mother, it might never happen. She
wouldn’t know how to find me. She could die without anyone knowing it. She had very few friends—she had alienated most of them. Michael knew that for my own future peace of mind, I needed to be able to tell myself that I had done everything I could. Absolutely everything.
So what are you going to do about your mother?

The psychiatrist’s office was on the ground floor of an apartment building on lower Park Avenue. Like many such offices, it announced itself discreetly, with a small bronze plaque. I had arrived early. I walked east, to Lexington Avenue, in search of a Starbucks—but coffee was the last thing I needed. I was already hopped up. My heart was racing; my fingers tingled. It was a bitter cold day, and the street felt like a wind tunnel. I should have been home in Brooklyn, packing up our brownstone. We were moving in less than a month.

I rounded the corner back to the doctor’s office, then checked my watch. It was three o’clock—the appointed time. Just as I was about to buzz the doctor’s intercom, a taxi pulled up in front of the building. She emerged slowly, swinging one leg, then the other, to the curb. The full-length fur coat, the freshly highlighted hair, the big, dark sunglasses: she didn’t look like a seventy-eight-year-old woman who had once been shattered by a near-fatal car accident. She was regal and beautiful as she greeted me, her cheekbone sharp and cool against my own.

“Hello, my dear daughter,” she said.

We walked together into the psychiatrist’s office that cold winter day. It was the first of what turned out to be six sessions we attended. We took our seats—she erect in the center of a sofa, me
slumped into the farthermost chair. What did I hope for? I know this much: I hoped. Fervently, deeply, powerfully, I hoped that in the presence of a neutral stranger with an advanced degree, my mother and I could connect.

Six sessions—six hours—and there are huge gaps in my memory, lacunae. I do remember the tone of her raised voice. The usual phrases—
How dare you? I was a wonderful mother! You seem to feel the need to turn me into a monster
—and the way they lost their power in the presence of a third party. It wasn’t long before he took my side. I hadn’t anticipated this. I know they’re not supposed to take sides, but he did.
Irene, you’re not listening to Dani. Excuse me. Excuse me, Irene. Irene! You’re not with us here. You’re not understanding anything that’s going on
.
Irene!
Rather than feeling vindicated, I felt guilty. It seemed cruel, and my fault, somehow. My relationship with my mother had always brought into question any sense I had of myself as a good and decent person. Surely I was poisoning the psychiatrist.
Poison
was a word my mother liked to use a lot.

At what turned out to be our final session, my mother came in carrying an oversize manila envelope. I didn’t think much of it at the time, or the way she rested it next to her on the sofa, or the way her gaze occasionally shifted to it. The psychiatrist was being particularly hard on her that day.
I understand why Dani feels like you don’t hear her, Irene. She isn’t real to you. You’re just talking at her.
Halfway through that last session, my mother jumped to her feet faster than I would have thought possible, and the envelope clattered to the floor. Her face was white with rage as she bent down, gathered it up, and stormed out of the office.

What followed—the next two events—have become forever linked in my mind. My mother called that night with the news
that the manila envelope contained the results of a brain scan that showed her to have metastasized cancer.
Didn’t you wonder what was in the envelope? Didn’t you even care?
When I got off the phone, shaken, I called the psychiatrist. Had he known? Had she told him? There was a long silence, during which I realized that he wasn’t at liberty to say. But he did offer me this, his parting words:
In thirty years of practice, I have never said this to a patient, but there is no hope for you and your mother. None at all.