STARTHROWERS

Indoctrination

When time slows down so much. Kind of like a storm door with that little contraption that keeps it from slamming. The faint hiss of the in-between.

The door of our house broken again from all the ins and outs. Five small daughters haltingly rearranging  the hand-me-down furniture. Not Cooking, more like peeling the carrots and then chopping the carrots. Whole and then in pieces. Raw and right from the earth and then added to the hot pan. . Not eating together, more like , Setting the table. Sitting down. Getting up to get more for your little sister. Spilling the milk and reaching for the paper towels to soak it up. Cutting the tender pork chop with your fork and chewing it, your teeth a fucking miracle, your eyes looking across the table at other eyes that came from the same ocean of a mother. Not cleaning the house, more like, picking up the socks that never match, looking at the dust fly off of the piano (that no one knows how to play) into the light. Suspended floating specks. Folding every size shirt and separating them into different piles, bringing them up and down the stairs with the broken banister. And not so much playing, more like, planting forget me nots to remember, your tiny fingers digging in the dirt. Contorting your body to express something, a back bend  - a human rainbow -  upside down. Rolling. Spinning. Holding hands. Letting go.  Pretending to be someone else with other smaller people, pretending to be other someone else's.  And  singing every word of other people’s songs - both the anguish and the hallelujah on our tongues,  alone and together. Making music. It all happened in the same house my father died in. 

I sang after his funeral, in the backyard, “Memory” from Cat’s. “It’s so easy to leave me, all alone with the memory of my days in the sun” So many people we loved stood outside and listened  to my 11 year old throat vibrating with those lyrics. So many people we loved were all there and then  they weren’t. They went to their homes and we stayed, living in that house. Adjusting to a sea change, a world shifted. My skinny, blond-haired arms holding my 18 month-old sister, the youngest one. I can see us all now. Tara, with her thin platinum pin straight bangs and muscley arms,  Erin with her strawberry blonde bowl cut , and round sweet face. Kelly with her blue eyes and raspy voice. Patricia, not even two years old, running and climbing and backhandspringing out of toddlerhood.  There they are. Their little legs . And my young beautiful mother. Her small frame, her pretty face, looking at all five of us. Her soul responsibility.  The sadness was so close it was too dangerous to acknowledge it with words. If we did, we might all fall apart together. We might drown in it.

Before the dying. Before the decay of my father’s 42 year-old strong and athletic body there was so much life happening around us. So much birth. 5  in under 10 years. New life, and new life, and new life, and new life. Rubbing right up against death. That it is all happening right next to one another. Thresholds and thresholds and thresholds. Like skin. 

I love words. I love language. But it has its limits. The lines, the form, the precise definition of one word.  The black ink against a white page,  lacking the fluidity of nuance, of  the between the lines kind of times in our life, the spaces between the meaning of the words. The sacred and precious time of grieving. The kind of grieving that forces you to name what you deeply loved. The tender and heartbreaking lesson of loss felt in the bones. A recognition of the miracle it is that life happens at all. That a whole human is here, of this world and then gone, gone, gone. 

I am back in my childhood house now. The months and years after my dad took his last labored breath in that house. And wasn’t it me, who rushed into the room of adults crying and standing over and around him while he died. And wasn't it me who held his dying hand and whispered “I love you”, all the while longing for his voice to whisper those words back to me.

Our house was a sacred space then. Our broken door would let people in and you could feel something special happening within those walls. A time machine? The slow motion maker on your phone?  It was unnamable. It was invisible. But it was happening, The messy work of broken hearts healing together. The patching up of a world crumbled. The ghosts and the ruins all around us while we sang ourselves almost whole in that house. We cooked and ate and cleaned and and took in hand me down furniture  and rearranged it a million different ways and blessed it with our love. We made pillsbury cinnamon rolls and fought over the middle, the most sugary one, with all of the icing dripping down the sides and my sweet sister with the raspy voice, sister number four, her 4 year old self would say “no, no we save that one for daddy”.  And we did. We saved the sweetest one for our father.

I would try to sing underwater in the summer after he died. Too old to be watching Disney movies but I made the excuse - I did it for my sisters. After all, their father had just died. As the oldest, I knew it was my duty to help my mother. I loved  the little mermaid with her red hair, just like mine,  and she wanted to live in another place too. Liminal times when we feel we are in a dark watery world and a new world is beckoning us but we cannot quite get there yet. I would sing the songs of longing underwater in the pool in our backyard. I would swim in the salt water sea just minutes away from our house. Ready and willing to give up my voice for the past or for someone to take the pain of longing away. Hoping we would somehow cast each other back into the land of the living.

I learned to live in two worlds then.

And I have never quite adjusted to the pace of life outside of that house. I will always be comforted by the timelessness felt when I am swimming in the ocean,  writing the songs,  or singing the songs. When I read the beautiful essay, “The Starthrower” by Loren Eiseley all the words I had been writing into songs seemed to all make sense as one larger chorus.

When he wrote about the human Starthrower who was throwing the dying starfish back into the ocean to save them from a death of drying on the cliff , I thought of my sisters and I just after our dad died. I thought of my mother. Their home had been washed out from under them too, from around them, by the tide. And that Starthrower was tossing them back into the ocean, back to their living home. At first, the narrator who witnesses this assumes the Starthrower is taking part in a pointless task. There were so many dying starfish, and there would be so many tides. When the narrator approaches he essentially asks “Why do you do it? And how will it make a difference? There are so many of them.”, the Starthrower responds that it DOES matter. Holding  the sea star in his hand, he tosses it and reminds us that it matters to THIS one. The narrator sees this and something changes for him. He recognizes the power of attention and care.  He begins to toss the dying sea stars back to the big living soup. He too becomes a thrower. And so it is the story of how we recognize our power in this world and what we can do with our love. In all of  our grieving there were people who stepped in to help my sisters and mom and I stay alive. They did it by being patient, they did it by standing by, they did it by listening, they did it by loving us.

Remembering that we are made up of the same stuff of both the sea star that we toss to save from a drying shoreline and the stars in the sky millions of miles from us. Sometimes we are saved, sometimes we are thrust into an unknown universe, sometimes we throw the ones that need saving. That time of grieving, of healing, of in-between indoctrinated us as Starthrowers, as ghost owers, as child growers. We were quietly being tossed back into the land of the living, again and again and as many times as we needed, by our extended family, by friends, sometimes by each other and by the earth itself. Art and music has also cast me back to aliveness in my life and so I create as a way to give back.

When a wave of grief crashes that hard against young humans, it can both make you brace yourself for every single wave after that and also make you realize that once the wave breaks it becomes part of the whole ocean again, it is pulled back into the water.  You have felt the pain of heartbreak and can not only survive the storms and tides of your life but maybe even have greater capacity in your heart for more waves, for more ocean.

There is something about humans who come together after the unfathomable, something dramatic that takes us out of the everyday and places us in the sacredness of the now. My sisters are that for me. When we are together another type of energy swirls. I imagine it happens for all survivors of heartbreak and heartache. In a house, on land, in the water. We are all, if we are lucky,  at some point for each other,  Starthrowers.