I have always had a strong nostalgic streak, and of course I am now very much affected by it. I have a tendency to idealize the past and wish that it could be preserved. When I was a little boy -- but no longer a baby -- and I had four little brothers -- I once asked my mother to hold me in my lap and rock me. I wanted to recapture my babyhood. Angela would say that I don't like change (especially when she wanted to change something, rearrange the furniture, say), and there is truth to that -- when I do accept change I like it to be gradual and slow. But of course my life right now is imposing changes on me at a pace I am not accustomed to, with the loss of Angela and two girls off to college. I hope I can adapt to them. I have done things to solidify my memories in the face of these changes, like putting up some family pictures and writing things like this blog.
All of this was brought home to me when I took Teresa up to Loyola last week. The night before I had been thinking about how we used to read to the girls at bedtime when we were little, and I thought of reading The Little House in the Big Woods, which has a moment in it that expresses perfectly the desire to hold onto the past. Of course the whole book is an expression of that desire, being the record of the memories of Laura Ingalls Wilder when she was a little girl, making those memories permanent. Angela has distinct memories of her very early years -- many more than I do of mine -- and it would have been nice to have recorded them in her own words. I can record them as I remember her telling them, but that is not the same thing.
The moment I thought about in The Little House in the Big Woods comes at the end, but can only be fully appreciated if you keep in mind the beginning. I remember being struck by this when I read the book to my little girls, 15 years ago or so (Angela had the set from her childhood).
The book opens like this:
**************************
Once upon a time, sixty years ago, a little girl lived in the Big Woods of Wisconsin, in a little gray house made of logs.
***************************
The book chronicles a year in the life of this little girl. At the end, Laura is lying in bed, listening to her father play his fiddle and sing.
******************************************************
Pa's strong, sweet voice was softly singing:
"Shall auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to mind?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And the days of auld lang syne?
And the days of auld lang syne, my friend,
And the days of auld lang syne,
Shall auld acquaintance be forgot,
And the days of auld lang syne?"
When the fiddle has stopped singing, Laura called out softly, "What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?"
"They are the days of a long time ago, Laura," Pa said. "Go to sleep, now."
But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa's fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.
She thought to herself, "This is now."
She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.
*****************************************************
I confess it gives me chills and brings a lump to my throat just to type this out. The desire to hold on to what we remember, in an eternal now, is very strong in me. And so I want to remember when my girls fell asleep with their Daddy playing his guitar and their Mommy singing for them. And yet every now passes us by and is replaced by another, and so we remember, and hope for a fulfillment in which all the nows of our passing time are embraced in one eternal now of the new creation, which Angela so wanted to understand before she died, and which I pray she can now (what "now" is this?) experience. I understand so little of this myself.
Driving up to Loyola last Thursday to move Teresa in, I told her and Rosie about this passage in The Little House in the Big Woods and found myself moved to tears. Whether tears purely of sadness I cannot say. I really was happy to see Teresa excited to move into her dorm room. Yet I have found it hard to adjust to the two older girls being gone as well as Angela. The apartment seems strangely empty at times. On Sunday, Gloria, Rosie and I went back up to Loyola for the opening of the year Mass, and Teresa was singing in the choir, and I was proud of her and happy for her -- she looked beautiful and confident and happy -- yet again there were tears -- because Angela was not there, and would have so loved to see this -- and maybe too, just because my daughter was moving out of our apartment into a world of her own.
Driving back from Loyola, talking about this further with Rosie, I realized that she has no real memory of my reading from the Little House books to her and her sisters -- she was just too young. And so I have started reading The Little House in the Big Woods to her, again. I hope this time will give me an opportunity to get closer to my youngest daughter, who has in some ways gotten the least of her parents' attention of the three -- especially since she was so young when our lives became suddenly more complex, burdened by the cancer. There is some nostalgia in this too, but also a real opportunity which I do not want to pass up.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Miscellaneous memories of Angela
I have been very busy the past week with getting my two older daughters moved to college – first Lucia to Benedictine College in Atchison, KS, and then Teresa to Loyola University, just on the north side of Chicago. Now I am here at home with only my youngest daughter, Rosie, left. Both Teresa and Rosie went with me to Atchison and helped Lucia move in, and Rosie also pitched in to help Teresa.It was something of an accomplishment for me to get all this taken care of. Dropping off children to college is supposed to be bittersweet anyway, and it is made all the more so by the fact of Angela’s absence. She would have been so happy and proud to see them settled.
The two move-in trips were different from each other in many ways. Angela and I had visited Loyola twice with Teresa, so there were memories there of the times we were together on that campus, sitting in the little coffee shop in the library overlooking the lake, working on her book manuscript. We hadn’t visited Benedictine, so there was regret that Angela hadn’t gotten to see the school where Lucia will study for the next three years. At the end of the move-in day there was a Mass at which the parents were asked to bless their children, and the children to thank their parents, and that was not easy for either Lucia or me. The drive to Benedictine and back was another long car trip (9 hours each way) which gave me further opportunities to talk to the girls. Loyola, on the other hand, is just at the other end of the city.
Atchison is a small town (10,000) that was built by the railroad and has a lot of impressive Victorian houses and buildings. Teresa and Rosie and I took a trolley tour of the town and visited one of the old homes as well as the local historical society museum. This brought back various miscellaneous memories that I want to record here. The associations are pretty loose in some cases. And they don’t add up to more than just a lot of memories, some of them from our time together, some of stories Angela told about her childhood and youth.
I remembered taking the girls to Indianapolis when Lucia was 3, Teresa was 1, and Rosie was no more than a thought in the mind of God, so that Angela could work in the state archives on her paper about involuntary sterilization of prison inmates in Indiana -- I remembered this specifically because I took the girls to various places such as the Indianapolis zoo and children's museum, but also to the home of Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president. The house tour in Atchison reminded me of that house tour in some way. This brought back many memories of other times and places with the girls when they were little -- visits to the South Bend Historical Museum, and Copshaholm, a Victorian mansion in South Bend that Teresa still recalls as a place she loved, and visits also to St Joseph, Michigan, where we would go to the lovely little Children's Museum as well as the beach, which had a giant play structure the girls always enjoyed.
In the Atchison museum, there was some kind of display about the county’s history, and I was reminded of the fact that Angela’s uncle Herman was a county commissioner in Greene County where she grew up. She told a story about passing her driver’s license examination when she was 16. She hadn’t done well on the test, but the state trooper on seeing her name asked “Are you any relation to Herman Gugalatta?” (That’s how he pronounced “Gugliotta.”) When she said “He’s my uncle,” the state trooper told her she passed the test. She said “I’m surprised” and he said “I am too.” Soon afterwards she was driving with her mother in the passenger seat and came to a dangerous curve on the interchange where I-79 north merges with I-70 – this is a curve where you are supposed to slow down to 25 mph and a lot of skid marks are visible on the side of the road, which slopes up like the wall of a bobsled run (I have driven this many times – apparently it is now slated to be replaced as there have been many accidents there). Angela didn’t slow down enough and started to lose control, and as she tells it her mom had to grab the steering wheel from the passenger seat. After that, Angela really didn’t want to drive on the highway, though when I first met her she had a 1976 Plymouth Satellite which she drove around Pittsburgh and later Baltimore, and did drive between Baltimore and Pittsburgh at least once with me as passenger. After I learned to drive and had bought a little Toyota Tercel (1987), I once followed Angela from Pittsburgh to Greene County where her mother lived, and at an interchange where there was construction and stopped traffic, I hit her car with mine from behind -- causing $1000 of damage to my fender and not even a noticeable dent to her bumper. She forgave me for that though I was incredibly embarrassed.
Also in the Atchison museum, I noticed an old player piano. This reminded me of Rita and William Ferrari, an older couple who lived just down the street from Angela’s mother. Rita babysat Angela when she was little, and Angela called her Ritabug, and called her husband Honey, because that is what she always heard Rita call him. After Angela’s father died, Honey became something of a father figure to her, and he walked her down the aisle at our wedding. I was introduced to him as Honey and so that is what I called him, which gave my best man a source of bad jokes at our wedding (“I thought Mike was marrying Angela, and here he was introducing me to this older guy as Honey.”) At some point before we were married, Rita and Honey had rescued and repaired an old player piano from a flood in someone else’s house, along with a bunch of old player piano rolls which they lovingly restored. They had this player piano (pie-anna) in the basement of their house along with the second kitchen (for big cooking days like Thanksgiving) and their two washing machines, the automatic and the “conventional” – the latter had a hand operated wringer, and they still used it. We used to go down into the basement and dance (waltzes and polkas) while Rita or Honey would pump the player piano. New player piano rolls were always a great Christmas present for them – one year we found the sheet music to an old twenties song about flappers, “Roll’em girls,” that Rita liked to play on the player piano. Somewhere in our house we have a cassette recording of Rita and the player piano, with Angela’s handwritten title “Ritabug pumps.” And the first dance at our wedding was actually a waltz to the music from that tape.
Angela's Plymouth Satellite had been a gift from Rita and Honey when they had bought a new car, and they had taken such loving care of it that she felt responsible to keep it going as long as possible. It went with her to Baltimore, where she moved it from parking space to parking space in a futile effort to avoid parking tickets, and occasionally drove it slowly around town. She never minded getting stuck behind a slow-moving truck or double-parked car -- she disliked driving at all fast and would say that her driving motto was "why go when you can stop?" When Angela went to graduate school in Wisconsin the year before we were married, she left the Plymouth parked outside my house in South Bend. Eventually it was ticketed for being parked in the wrong direction, and then we moved it into the driveway. Later we loaned it to some friends on hard times in exchange for their paying for oil changes, insurance, and gas. When they didn't need it anymore, I offered to an incoming professor for free, as long as he would pay for some work it needed -- about $500 of work as I recall -- but after the work was done he drove the car and decided he didn't want it, leaving us stuck with the bill for the work. He will remain nameless (indeed I have forgotten his name, though not the fact that he was coming in with an endowed professorship and I was a junior faculty member at the time for whom $500 was a pretty big deal of money). The garage owner very nicely took the car off our hands, charged us for the work, and then gave us enough free work on our car to make up for the charges. Sometime later we saw the Plymouth being driven around South Bend and knew that the garage owner had managed to sell it.
While in Atchison, I received an e-mail from one of my former colleagues about Angela’s death. He reminded me that Angela had a habit of calling me “Eeyore” whenever I would get into a somewhat morose mood – Eeyore being the character in Winnie-the-Pooh who always looks on the gloomy side of life. I would joke back “Just you wait, it’ll rain yet today.” I then remembered another characteristic expression of Angela’s – “Kennywood’s open.” She would say this if she noticed that I had forgotten to zip up my fly after using the bathroom. Kennywood is a famous old amusement park near Pittsburgh. You can interpret the expression as you like; it’s pretty common in the Pittsburgh area (it’s even made it into urbandictionary.com), but I’ve never heard it from anyone not from Pittsburgh. Angela and I visited Kennywood with a group of friends not too long before we started going out – we rode at least two big rollercoasters, which was a sign of the degree of my interest in her, since I was terrified of rollercoasters. It was worth it to me to get to sit next to her. We had a great time, but her glasses flew off on one of the rides and were never found, so she had to buy new ones. It is nice to remember these things, even if it is kind of sad to think that no one will ever call me Eeyore again, or remind me that Kennywood’s open.
So there are some memories that came to me during my trip to Atchison. More memories came back to me when I took Teresa up to Loyola, but I’ll save those for another post.
The two move-in trips were different from each other in many ways. Angela and I had visited Loyola twice with Teresa, so there were memories there of the times we were together on that campus, sitting in the little coffee shop in the library overlooking the lake, working on her book manuscript. We hadn’t visited Benedictine, so there was regret that Angela hadn’t gotten to see the school where Lucia will study for the next three years. At the end of the move-in day there was a Mass at which the parents were asked to bless their children, and the children to thank their parents, and that was not easy for either Lucia or me. The drive to Benedictine and back was another long car trip (9 hours each way) which gave me further opportunities to talk to the girls. Loyola, on the other hand, is just at the other end of the city.
Atchison is a small town (10,000) that was built by the railroad and has a lot of impressive Victorian houses and buildings. Teresa and Rosie and I took a trolley tour of the town and visited one of the old homes as well as the local historical society museum. This brought back various miscellaneous memories that I want to record here. The associations are pretty loose in some cases. And they don’t add up to more than just a lot of memories, some of them from our time together, some of stories Angela told about her childhood and youth.
I remembered taking the girls to Indianapolis when Lucia was 3, Teresa was 1, and Rosie was no more than a thought in the mind of God, so that Angela could work in the state archives on her paper about involuntary sterilization of prison inmates in Indiana -- I remembered this specifically because I took the girls to various places such as the Indianapolis zoo and children's museum, but also to the home of Benjamin Harrison, 23rd president. The house tour in Atchison reminded me of that house tour in some way. This brought back many memories of other times and places with the girls when they were little -- visits to the South Bend Historical Museum, and Copshaholm, a Victorian mansion in South Bend that Teresa still recalls as a place she loved, and visits also to St Joseph, Michigan, where we would go to the lovely little Children's Museum as well as the beach, which had a giant play structure the girls always enjoyed.
In the Atchison museum, there was some kind of display about the county’s history, and I was reminded of the fact that Angela’s uncle Herman was a county commissioner in Greene County where she grew up. She told a story about passing her driver’s license examination when she was 16. She hadn’t done well on the test, but the state trooper on seeing her name asked “Are you any relation to Herman Gugalatta?” (That’s how he pronounced “Gugliotta.”) When she said “He’s my uncle,” the state trooper told her she passed the test. She said “I’m surprised” and he said “I am too.” Soon afterwards she was driving with her mother in the passenger seat and came to a dangerous curve on the interchange where I-79 north merges with I-70 – this is a curve where you are supposed to slow down to 25 mph and a lot of skid marks are visible on the side of the road, which slopes up like the wall of a bobsled run (I have driven this many times – apparently it is now slated to be replaced as there have been many accidents there). Angela didn’t slow down enough and started to lose control, and as she tells it her mom had to grab the steering wheel from the passenger seat. After that, Angela really didn’t want to drive on the highway, though when I first met her she had a 1976 Plymouth Satellite which she drove around Pittsburgh and later Baltimore, and did drive between Baltimore and Pittsburgh at least once with me as passenger. After I learned to drive and had bought a little Toyota Tercel (1987), I once followed Angela from Pittsburgh to Greene County where her mother lived, and at an interchange where there was construction and stopped traffic, I hit her car with mine from behind -- causing $1000 of damage to my fender and not even a noticeable dent to her bumper. She forgave me for that though I was incredibly embarrassed.
Also in the Atchison museum, I noticed an old player piano. This reminded me of Rita and William Ferrari, an older couple who lived just down the street from Angela’s mother. Rita babysat Angela when she was little, and Angela called her Ritabug, and called her husband Honey, because that is what she always heard Rita call him. After Angela’s father died, Honey became something of a father figure to her, and he walked her down the aisle at our wedding. I was introduced to him as Honey and so that is what I called him, which gave my best man a source of bad jokes at our wedding (“I thought Mike was marrying Angela, and here he was introducing me to this older guy as Honey.”) At some point before we were married, Rita and Honey had rescued and repaired an old player piano from a flood in someone else’s house, along with a bunch of old player piano rolls which they lovingly restored. They had this player piano (pie-anna) in the basement of their house along with the second kitchen (for big cooking days like Thanksgiving) and their two washing machines, the automatic and the “conventional” – the latter had a hand operated wringer, and they still used it. We used to go down into the basement and dance (waltzes and polkas) while Rita or Honey would pump the player piano. New player piano rolls were always a great Christmas present for them – one year we found the sheet music to an old twenties song about flappers, “Roll’em girls,” that Rita liked to play on the player piano. Somewhere in our house we have a cassette recording of Rita and the player piano, with Angela’s handwritten title “Ritabug pumps.” And the first dance at our wedding was actually a waltz to the music from that tape.
Angela's Plymouth Satellite had been a gift from Rita and Honey when they had bought a new car, and they had taken such loving care of it that she felt responsible to keep it going as long as possible. It went with her to Baltimore, where she moved it from parking space to parking space in a futile effort to avoid parking tickets, and occasionally drove it slowly around town. She never minded getting stuck behind a slow-moving truck or double-parked car -- she disliked driving at all fast and would say that her driving motto was "why go when you can stop?" When Angela went to graduate school in Wisconsin the year before we were married, she left the Plymouth parked outside my house in South Bend. Eventually it was ticketed for being parked in the wrong direction, and then we moved it into the driveway. Later we loaned it to some friends on hard times in exchange for their paying for oil changes, insurance, and gas. When they didn't need it anymore, I offered to an incoming professor for free, as long as he would pay for some work it needed -- about $500 of work as I recall -- but after the work was done he drove the car and decided he didn't want it, leaving us stuck with the bill for the work. He will remain nameless (indeed I have forgotten his name, though not the fact that he was coming in with an endowed professorship and I was a junior faculty member at the time for whom $500 was a pretty big deal of money). The garage owner very nicely took the car off our hands, charged us for the work, and then gave us enough free work on our car to make up for the charges. Sometime later we saw the Plymouth being driven around South Bend and knew that the garage owner had managed to sell it.
While in Atchison, I received an e-mail from one of my former colleagues about Angela’s death. He reminded me that Angela had a habit of calling me “Eeyore” whenever I would get into a somewhat morose mood – Eeyore being the character in Winnie-the-Pooh who always looks on the gloomy side of life. I would joke back “Just you wait, it’ll rain yet today.” I then remembered another characteristic expression of Angela’s – “Kennywood’s open.” She would say this if she noticed that I had forgotten to zip up my fly after using the bathroom. Kennywood is a famous old amusement park near Pittsburgh. You can interpret the expression as you like; it’s pretty common in the Pittsburgh area (it’s even made it into urbandictionary.com), but I’ve never heard it from anyone not from Pittsburgh. Angela and I visited Kennywood with a group of friends not too long before we started going out – we rode at least two big rollercoasters, which was a sign of the degree of my interest in her, since I was terrified of rollercoasters. It was worth it to me to get to sit next to her. We had a great time, but her glasses flew off on one of the rides and were never found, so she had to buy new ones. It is nice to remember these things, even if it is kind of sad to think that no one will ever call me Eeyore again, or remind me that Kennywood’s open.
So there are some memories that came to me during my trip to Atchison. More memories came back to me when I took Teresa up to Loyola, but I’ll save those for another post.
Tuesday, August 24, 2010
The first post
I have decided to start this blog to continue the posts that I had been putting up on the carepages website for my wife Angela Gugliotta, who died on June 1, 2010, of metastatic breast cancer. After her death I continued to post on carepages as a means of recording my grief journey. But now I think it is more appropriate to use some other venue to continue this form of expression. Hence this rather minimalist blog. It may grow and develop over time. I am new to this.
The title of my blog comes from something Angela wrote after her seizure a little more than a year ago. On her facebook page she wrote of waking up in the hospital:
"Hey everyone. I am so moved by the beauty of the efforts and gifts of all out friends. I woke up, and the first thing I saw was my my green blue gold and red painted finger nails,but over the next day or two much more inspiring reasons to wake up were the similarly varied and beautifully colored eyes of friends and family gathered around my beds -- and beyond these visions all the extraordinary support we've had."
She woke up with an immense sense of gratitude for still being alive. She felt the beauty of the world and experienced all her senses as heightened. Although she knew her time was limited she felt that she had some things to do in this world yet, and she had been given some time to do them still. One thing she wanted to do was to explore her spirituality and her beliefs about the value of creation and the idea of a new creation. She started a journal about this and the first thing she did in the journal was to write out a kind of semi-poetic meditation on the experience of waking up and her gratitude for it, and her sense of the presence and reality of God in the world. The first line of this meditation was "What is this that I am awake to?" which she repeated several times in the course of the meditation. I have taken this line as the title for this blog.
She worked carefully on this meditation, as is evident from the fact that there are two versions in her journal, one with edits and scratching out, the other written out in final form. I am not sure whether I should share more of this meditation on this blog. Perhaps at some later date I will write out the whole thing. But for the moment I will just stick to the first line: "What is this that I am awake to?"
That is how she began her journal after her seizure, and her exploration of faith and life over her last months. It has moved me a great deal. I think she accomplished much with the nine and a half months she was given, from August 18 when she awoke from her sedation to June 1 when she died -- almost exactly the normal time of human gestation, from conception to childbirth. Three times she had gone through the 40 weeks of pregnancy, giving birth to our three daughters. Three times she gave birth without anesthetic, experiencing the pains of childbirth. In the last 40 weeks of her life, she gave birth to a new sense of peace and co-operation in our household, to a greater love in our marital relationship, to many new thoughts in her own intellectual life and work, to a deeper understanding of her own spirituality and relationship to God. She did this while suffering pains she would describe as worse than those of childbirth -- even with the pain medication that helped some of the time. She lived out of love for the people in her life, her friends, her family, her mother, our children, and me. She was fully alive to her world and its beauty, in spite of the pain.
But now she is no longer awake to this world. My faith assures me she is not merely dead and gone, and I hope she is now asking with a renewed and even deeper sense of wonder "What is this that I am awake to?"
But in the meantime, I still wake up every morning to this world that she loved, and although I miss her terribly I would like somehow to take up her gratitude for and wonder at the world, its beauty, the friends that surround me, the work that I still have to do. So I would like to take up her question, and the wonder and gratitude it expresses, as a kind of motto and guide: "What is this that I am awake to?" And so I have titled this blog. In it I will record my experiences for the next while -- experiences of grief and sorrow and where possible joy and learning.
The title of my blog comes from something Angela wrote after her seizure a little more than a year ago. On her facebook page she wrote of waking up in the hospital:
"Hey everyone. I am so moved by the beauty of the efforts and gifts of all out friends. I woke up, and the first thing I saw was my my green blue gold and red painted finger nails,but over the next day or two much more inspiring reasons to wake up were the similarly varied and beautifully colored eyes of friends and family gathered around my beds -- and beyond these visions all the extraordinary support we've had."
She woke up with an immense sense of gratitude for still being alive. She felt the beauty of the world and experienced all her senses as heightened. Although she knew her time was limited she felt that she had some things to do in this world yet, and she had been given some time to do them still. One thing she wanted to do was to explore her spirituality and her beliefs about the value of creation and the idea of a new creation. She started a journal about this and the first thing she did in the journal was to write out a kind of semi-poetic meditation on the experience of waking up and her gratitude for it, and her sense of the presence and reality of God in the world. The first line of this meditation was "What is this that I am awake to?" which she repeated several times in the course of the meditation. I have taken this line as the title for this blog.
She worked carefully on this meditation, as is evident from the fact that there are two versions in her journal, one with edits and scratching out, the other written out in final form. I am not sure whether I should share more of this meditation on this blog. Perhaps at some later date I will write out the whole thing. But for the moment I will just stick to the first line: "What is this that I am awake to?"
That is how she began her journal after her seizure, and her exploration of faith and life over her last months. It has moved me a great deal. I think she accomplished much with the nine and a half months she was given, from August 18 when she awoke from her sedation to June 1 when she died -- almost exactly the normal time of human gestation, from conception to childbirth. Three times she had gone through the 40 weeks of pregnancy, giving birth to our three daughters. Three times she gave birth without anesthetic, experiencing the pains of childbirth. In the last 40 weeks of her life, she gave birth to a new sense of peace and co-operation in our household, to a greater love in our marital relationship, to many new thoughts in her own intellectual life and work, to a deeper understanding of her own spirituality and relationship to God. She did this while suffering pains she would describe as worse than those of childbirth -- even with the pain medication that helped some of the time. She lived out of love for the people in her life, her friends, her family, her mother, our children, and me. She was fully alive to her world and its beauty, in spite of the pain.
But now she is no longer awake to this world. My faith assures me she is not merely dead and gone, and I hope she is now asking with a renewed and even deeper sense of wonder "What is this that I am awake to?"
But in the meantime, I still wake up every morning to this world that she loved, and although I miss her terribly I would like somehow to take up her gratitude for and wonder at the world, its beauty, the friends that surround me, the work that I still have to do. So I would like to take up her question, and the wonder and gratitude it expresses, as a kind of motto and guide: "What is this that I am awake to?" And so I have titled this blog. In it I will record my experiences for the next while -- experiences of grief and sorrow and where possible joy and learning.
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