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In early December, I put my subscription on pause, reinstated it, then suspended reading again. The mere act of consuming news one bite at a time sickened me. Playing games lost its meaning. I cancelled cable TV, too, and escaped into streaming mysteries on PBS and Amazon Prime. No CNN. No MSNBC. Sorrow has a limit. I had yet to find it.

I said to myself, “It will be different for my grandchildren, they who inherit the earth. They will make change, be change, live change.”

Still, I despaired and shared my woes with my Facebook community. One woman had responded to the election results by indicating what she did to soothe herself. “I went shopping and drank coffee.”

In commiseration, I promptly responded, “For two days I went off my gluten-free diet. I had real spaghetti with cheese that I bought at a specialty shop. I drove to the bakery and consumed a large cinnamon roll.”

The man who has been my lover for nearly four years, a conservative Republican, incessantly talks about how he pays one hundred and sixty dollars at the grocery store and gets almost nothing. Gas prices keep rising. Every so often they fall, only to rise more.

When grief still held me in its grasp, this lover wanted to visit me.

“You won’t have fun,” I warned him. “My cat is dying, and so are women.”

Greeted with silence on the other end, I asked what, if anything, I had taught him. “And I’m not talking about sex,” I quickly added.

“What it’s like to be a woman,” he answered.

“In that case, you’ll donate to Planned Parenthood. I’m asking my friends on Facebook to honor my birthday by contributing.”

A generous man, he whipped out his credit card and added a hundred dollars. Still and all, his donation wasn’t as important as his concern for gas, milk prices, the influx of illegal immigrants—who, he was certain, were mainly gang members—and the disintegration of our civilization, culture, decency, and love for our country. “These days everybody has a tattoo, sometimes many tattoos,” he snorted, “even women!”

“Thank you for donating. I’ve almost reached my goal.” Pointing out that my views on what constitutes civilization differed from his would get me nowhere. Besides, I appreciated his payment even when he said that he only did it because he cared about me.

Although I had met my goal, the day before my birthday, I forged ahead with fundraising by confronting potential last-minute donors. “Women are dying for the price of milk and gas,” I wrote. Then I launched into personal details of my first pregnancy. I didn’t mention that one in five women has one or more miscarriages, mainly in the first trimester, nor did I indicate that in some states with restrictive abortion laws, doctors fear legal prosecution due to the ambiguous nature of these laws that don’t distinguish between abortion and miscarriage.

I had indicated these facts to my lover who, for a period of a day or so, could be moved by documentation and personal stories. He inevitably circled back to a diatribe about Hollywood actresses who tout abortions as a means of birth control, thus influencing susceptible kids.

I had just passed the eight week mark. In celebration, I went shopping for a pregnancy outfit. I found a blouse with flowers that reminded me of spring promises. In the dressing room I took off my shirt. Something felt wrong. I hadn’t bought pants, but I took mine off. I had red spots on my underwear. I left the blouse in the dressing room, put my pants back on, and walked slowly outside.

For the longest time, I stood at the bus stop, right leg crossed over left. Something was being lost, someone who didn’t have a name yet unless you want to call Taco Bell a kid’s name. (Every few days during those eight weeks, I needed to consume something from that chain, thus the endearing name.)  Darkness descended inside of me as I stood waiting. My husband and I were living in Pittsburgh on the Negley bus line. I was a graduate student, one week out from taking my Ph.D. orals. When I boarded, I felt certain that more blood had escaped my body. I told myself to hold on. Get home. It’s all right. Only some spotting. It happens.

“I’m bleeding,” I informed my husband once I arrived home. The words rushed out of somebody’s mouth. Not me. Certainly not me. I lay in bed, quietly breathing. If I slowed movement down to the bare minimum, I’d be all right. I attempted to read one of the Russian novels I needed to know for my upcoming oral and written exams. At some point, my husband called my obstetrician. At some point, I ran to the bathroom. Chunks of blood filled the toilet bowl. There was no controlling it. Then the ambulance came. My husband held my hand while we sped down the street. “Something’s happening,” I kept saying.

In the hospital, doctors gave me a D&C. I don’t remember if it hurt or not. All I felt was loss. Immense loss. Somebody informed me that I could try again. I would just have to wait.

I didn’t bleed out in a parking lot. I didn’t bleed out in an emergency room. I wasn’t in extreme pain although I cried for days. I was thirty-three. I wondered if I’d ever have a child. My husband and I had done everything right. We waited for me to finish Ph.D. course work. We used a basal thermometer. We had planned everything. How could I lose this baby? Was something wrong with me? At the time, I didn’t know how many women miscarry, although my own mother did after her third child (me) and my younger brother. She, too, suffered. Yet she had three children at the time. This would have been my first. I thought it could be my last.

Want consumed me. Where something, someone, had lived inside of me, now there was nothing. Walking around as two is so very different than as one. I felt that I was less than one.

Because I felt so bad, I carried a sign around the English department: “Don’t talk to me.” I was about to take my orals. I don’t know if my examiners figured I’d pass. I did. I also eventually gave birth to two wonderful sons who now have children of their own.

When I fill out health forms, I write, “three” for the answer to how many pregnancies I’ve had: two live births, three pregnancies. Women mourn when they have miscarriages. They mourn over abortions, and they are dying because they can’t get the care they need while the price of gas goes up or down, and, when we shop, we continue to get precious little for our money.

“Tohu Vavohu,” I say to myself. A darkness and void that do not predate creation but descend after knowledge has entered the world. Then one thinks of what could have been and how much has been lost. Chaos reigns over the face of the deep.

The Naked Sycamore, photograph by Miriam Bat-Ami

All year long, the sycamore tree sheds something. Shading my front yard, it flings off branches and large-sized leaves that get stuck under the boxwood bushes and inside the tangled English ivy. In the heat of July, new bark growth pushes onto the outer layer that cracks and falls. Curled papery scrolls litter the lawn. Throughout the summer, lifting itself above telephone wires, the behemoth of a tree shamelessly stands naked, its trunk and branches splotchy-white and continually peeling like a sunburnt kid.

During the dog days of August into late fall, the sycamore—often maligned as a “trash tree”—throws out spiky, round seed balls that break apart and settle in the grass and dirt of the debris-filled lawn. Even in winter, this bearer of unwanted gifts drops branches onto the snow, as if to tell me how much one can bless messy growth.

Raking leaves, picking up bark and seed pods, piling up branches on top of the unruly ivy, I often wonder who I’ve become since my husband departed this earth. How did I, like Sleeping Beauty, suddenly wake up, my body craving touch? I imagine myself standing in front of lost=and-found tables in the temple, the elementary school, the theater cloakroom, and the fitness center storage space. I rummage through swim caps, T-shirts, different-colored mittens and gloves, multiple-sized boots, socks, headbands, and hats lying alongside half-empty water bottles. I want to stretch myself across the tables among all the missing items. Here I am, the widow, shedding her skin. Here I am, losing and finding myself again and again while the grand sycamore, planted long ago, stands naked and stately, content with its scrappy life.

Love is a twirling leaf held up in the air by the thread of a spider. Love sits on the back of a tiger swallowtail and breathes through the wings of a butterfly. Love won’t be held too hard or too softly, continually changes, and yet remains constant. Love won’t be discounted, diminished, or dismissed. It hides itself inside the smallest shell on the grave of those who won’t be forgotten. It speaks in tongues and can’t be translated. Hovers briefly on a backyard butterfly bush. I have loved. I have been loved. I am loved. I love. Cloaked by this knowledge, I rise each day, bless the present, and embrace the future.

 

Fly, My Darling: a love story

By Lisa K. Richter

  A soulful memoir of desire and a woman’s midlife quest to let go—in jazz and in life   Lisa—a classically trained pianist, wife, and mother—yearns for something she can’t define. After she begins a study of jazz improv with an outspoken, trailblazing musician from the ’70s girl band era, a woman who encourages Lisa to let go musically and emotionally, life takes an unexpected, irrevocable turn. When they become lovers, what began as a desire to learn jazz becomes a lesson in letting go: with music, with an old way of living, and finally with life itself.


With rhythmic, imaginative prose, Fly, My Darling explores the resilience of love, the weight of loss, the undeniable pull toward freedom, and the transformation that occurs when a woman finally asks, What do I really want? Based on the author’s years together with musician and visionary composer Lynda Roth, past and present weave together in this intimate journey of awakened eroticism and music.

“A graceful and spare memoir of personal transformation and loss.”— Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Available at Bookshop, Simon & Schuster, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and through your local independent bookstore.

More at LisaKRichter.com

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