5. My Patchwork Quilt of Loss and Life

We know that each life ends.  No one really knows what happens afterwards and it is so hard to grapple with that unknown. We try to make sense of it, each in our own way.  Perhaps our spirit lives on, or we dissolve into the energy of the universe? Maybe we become angels, hovering in the clouds, pulling heaven’s strings to help our loved ones when life gets hard?  Do some go to hell or purgatory or paradise?  Does it take 42 days for your soul to reorient itself and find its way into a new body? Maybe we are just ashes to ashes and dust to dust?

Some losses make you sad and thoughtful about the meaning of it all.  When you lose someone who is essential to the core of your being it can bring the whole world crashing down around you.  When I got the word that my Dad had a stroke, I felt like time stood still.  I found myself watching one of those apocalyptic movies where fire bubbles up through the pavement and buildings tumble and fall.  Bridges snap in half and California cracks into pieces and slides into the sea.  It all felt so oddly real and true. The world as I had always known it was gone.

We had a few days when my Dad regained consciousness and he could talk.  He was disoriented and seemed to be sorting though the archives of his life.  We tried to understand what he said but some of it remains a mystery to those of us on this side of the end.  There were moments of clarity when he knew us and spoke to us with his eyes.  All three of his daughters have his eyes and he schooled us in how to see.  He was an educator and taught us to embrace our curiosity, to explore the world through our senses and to value and trust our own experience.  He always treated us with great respect and took our learning process seriously.  Although I have come across plenty of disrespect out in the world, my Dad made sure I knew that was the result of others’ insecurities and not of my failings.  He raised two generations of smart, creative, confident and independent women and we stand as a legacy to his love.

I was not there in the moments when he left this life and I find this loss echoing out across time. The last time I lived with my Dad was in 1976.  I was in 6th grade and we lived in Arlington, Massachusetts during the Bicentennial, the two hundredth anniversary of the American Revolution.  The entire school year was dedicated to learning about that moment in history.  We followed the brick pathway tracing Paul Revere’s Ride from Charlestown through Arlington Center, on the way to Lexington to warn the colonists that the British were coming. We saw sheep shorn at Sturbridge Village and bought the wool to card, spin and weave into warm cloth.  I learned to quilt, like Betsy Ross did when she sewed strips of red and white onto a square of blue.  Thirteen white stars sewn into a circle represented the 13 original colonies.  I made an appliqué of the church on our street that had been a meeting place for revolutionaries, and it became one square in a larger class quilt.  A handmade tribute to our patchwork nation.

My parents divorced at the end of that school year, and we had regular visits with my Dad for a few years.  Then both my parents remarried and I moved to New Jersey with my Mom, only seeing my Dad on holidays and school vacations.  I patched over those loses with the new families both my parents created.  We stitched the gap in time and miles with Greyhound, Amtrak and People’s Express, a short lived airline that flew us from NY to Boston for $30.  In high school, I made a quilt of my faded jeans, sewing patches over holes in the knees and embroidering flowers along the edges.  On the day I turned 17, I got my license and could drive myself up Rt 84 to the Mass Pike, to Medford and Melrose and eventually to New Hampshire to connect with my Dad and his new family.  Still, saying goodbye at the end of every visit conjures the feel of frayed fabric that has fallen apart at the knees, the loss that echoes on under the patches.  I have been quilting over layers of loss with new life for so many years that it’s hard to trace the threads back through time.  I am now the one trying to teach my nieces to live with that loss every time I leave, patches of lightheartedness over the old ache of goodbye.

Mourning is a such a mysterious pathway through time, heart, mind and memory.  Like Paul Revere’s Ride, I’m traveling back in time, charting a world that has been forever changed.  If each brick is a goodbye, I can follow this path of loss back nearly a half century.  The echo has become a part of who I am.  Tears led me down this road, but I am reminded it was my 6th grade self who became a seamstress.  In revolutionary spirit, I stitched my divided family into a newly formed quilt.  I took the rough wool of separation and spun it into resilience.  Across the time and miles I wove a warm cloth of love that united my family in my heart, if not in the world.  My Dad is now on the other side of the end and I can only imagine what that means for him.  My life with him in it is gone.  But he is the very thread that made me, my love of learning, my theoretical mind, my creative resilience and the desire to stitch my disjointed experience into a quilt of words .  He left our whole family a rich legacy of lessons to savor, explore and build upon: new bricks to lay down as we ride out into the future.