Endings and Beginnings
We think the past behind us, and the future ahead. That errors and misjudgments in the rearview mirror are over, and possibilities to come are visible only through the front windshield. This week I discovered none of those assumptions are completely accurate.
This has been a week of time travel. If you think hurtling from the current moment to some past or future moment might be a little disorienting, just try springing back and forth, as I have. It scrambles the brain, hurts the joints, and stretches both ligaments and credulity.
A journey through time takes us through finishes and starts, because time is mostly about endings and beginnings.
This week I completed the first draft of a novel, Tinyboy. Great story, I think, but it ends three years of living with my characters in the world I’ve created for them. I’ve become fond of them, gone to sleep at night and woken up in the morning wondering how I could help them negotiate the challenges that await them each day. There’s editing to do, of course, but my intimate time with them has essentially ended.
Days now stretch out ahead of me as I mourn the loss of these friends and advisors through whose filters I’ve been seeing the world. Now I wait for the next possibility to emerge. A loss and an opportunity. An end and a beginning.
This weekend we held a massive family reunion with people coming from all over the globe. All of us who attended are alive because our grandparents and great-grandparents successfully fled the pogroms in Eastern Europe and survived the Holocaust. That we exist at all is nothing short of miraculous. A thousand family photographs have been digitized, images going back to Lithuania in the late 1890s and the farming village of Biblis on the Rhine, where we came from before World War II. We will gather together—a community of people who belong to one another—because we are bound by blood, by history and by love, the oldest in his mid-nineties, the youngest still suckling at his mother’s breast.
Death and life. Endings and beginnings.
My father is 95. We talk together, in moments of lucidity, about fragility, about slipping away. We watch my mother, also in her nineties, in the eighth decade of a loving and generous marriage, as she smooths my father’s hair and patiently answers his questions about which university he will be entering in a few weeks. The one in Cambridge, he thinks, where there may be a scholarship awaiting him. Medical degree from South Africa notwithstanding, he would like an undergraduate degree from a university in the US. He’s been a student all his life; it’s only natural that he would want to continue studying. Why stop? As he says, sitting at his dining room table where he spends most of his few waking hours these days, he’ll go crazy if he just sits around. Have to get him a car, he says, so that he can drive back and forth to classes. I promise to organize it.
The grown grandchildren come to visit, bringing with them their own babies and toddlers. My mother takes the same joy in them as she has in every generation. My father watches from his wheelchair in amazement, acknowledging with gratitude and grace how fortunate he is to be alive in this time and place.
Endings and beginnings.
My daughter is the de facto designated hoarder of family memories. She’d probably be offended by that term. Let’s call her instead Master Guardian and Curator of Family Artifacts. As a part of the coming family reunion, in addition to photographs, she’s unearthed a series of ancient videos. Soundless video of her grandparents’ wedding in the 1940s. Videos of herself, her brother, and their cousins, as babies. One video, in particular, stands out. A lengthy one, taken by my father, who was clearly as enamored of his new video technology as he was by the subject matter. It was taken 34 years ago when my daughter was a year old. In those long-ago photos and videos, I appear to myself as youthful and unformed, smiling and painfully innocent. The moment is bittersweet. I handle my baby daughter with the same natural ease and facility I brought to raising my son a few years later, and now to my grandchildren. The joy back then in my parents’ living room is palpable. And so, for me, is the looming future, in which my marriage would come apart at the seams. We would be thrown into the chaos of separation and divorce, which, like all young people in similar situations, we had no idea how to navigate. In retrospect, we all rose to the challenges amid pain, but the following few years were toll-takers.
Beginnings and endings.
Yesterday I was with that same daughter, pregnant with her first child, and now in her third trimester. As we drove off in our respective cars, she called me. She was on her way to the midwife for her monthly prenatal visit, and asked me whether I had any desire to accompany her and listen to her baby’s heartbeat. I asked whether she wanted me to, and she said it was all the same to her. I thanked her, but said no. I had a blog to write. Had to go to the gym. There was supper to cook. To myself, I said, it feels inappropriate.
But I’ve learned that life is too short to hesitate. Being willing to change one’s mind is a sign of health and well-being and should be acted upon without delay. Of course, she wanted me there. Wouldn’t have asked otherwise. Writing this blog could wait. And these days, being inappropriate concerns me less and less. Did I really care what anyone else thought? Immediately, I called back. I would be delighted to accompany her and was deeply grateful that she wanted me to.
The last time I was at a prenatal visit was as an excited, expectant father. Much has changed, but some things remain the same.
Back then, we had a male physician; now, there are midwives. The technology is better. Questions about pregnancy are similar, although some of the answers are not. What supplements to take, what positions to sleep in, how to exercise.
The lovely young midwife is surprised and delighted to have a grandfather in her examination room. When she gently touches my daughter’s abdomen and smiles as she announces that the baby’s head has rotated and is facing downward, she looks at me and says how wonderful it is that I’m there to experience this with my daughter. I tell her that she has the most wonderful job in the world. She agrees.
At the sound of a healthy fetal heartbeat, I feel the same sense of wonder and joy I felt at hearing the sound of my own children in utero. My daughter and I exchange glances, and we grin. Nothing need be said about what we feel for one another, or how delighted we are to be there in that instant. The joy I feel for her and her husband is inexpressible. That moment is past, but long after I’m gone, she will remember that I was there to experience it with her.
I see young parents with babies and toddlers and feel a pang of regret that those rich days, complex though they might have been, are now over for me. The past stretches out like an ocean. Its waves break rhythmically on my shore. The future is merged with that same ocean, but I have no idea what it holds. The next crashing breaker might deliver scattered sprays of image and emotion from the past, fall back down the sloping beach of memory, and be reabsorbed by the sea. Or, it might be delivering the future, something I have yet to imagine. When I look out at that ocean, my past stretches out all the way to the horizon, while the future becomes froth and air just a little way beyond where the shallows darken, and the ocean floor begins to decline.
In a few months, spirits willing, I will hold another grandchild in my arms. And a few months after that, yet another will be born. That will make five. For all of them, East Coast and West, I look forward to watching their happiness expand as they create their own oceans. Their view of our beach is of a past that turns to froth at the tide line, while their futures stretch all the way to the horizon.
Losses and opportunities.
Endings and beginnings.
Pretty much the sum of what we have, and what we are.