Illustration by Lisa Keppeler. Used with her kind permission.
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It’s September, 2019 and ten weeks after my heart surgery and I’m taking my first walk in the woods since then and the first thing I notice is the fecund smell of fallen leaves and pine needles and dying trees…
and the scents of hay and cows and horses in my great-grandfather’s barn, and the waft of fried onions and potatoes in Nanny and Grampy Lufkin’s house, and the whiff of perfume and cigarettes in Nanny Cleaves’s apartment, and the aroma of Mom’s fresh baked bread on Saturday mornings…
and a few years later: the earthy odors of the market garden where I worked summers, the pungence of wet towels, dirty socks and jockstraps in the locker-room beneath the gym where I spent so much time…
and the fragrances of my Aqua Velva, and her White Shoulders blending in the back seat of the family Ford …
and later still: the salt smack of ocean breeze thru the spruce trees around our camp in the early days of marriage when love was new and life’s possibilities seemed endless…
and because autumn is when things die, memory sniffs the acrid smoke from the Old Town Paper Company as I drift, bitter and aimless, across the university campus, no longer the high school bigshot and no idea who the hell I am or where I’m going…
and then the dank reek of the dregs of the pipe tobacco I used to smoke during the last years of that first marriage…
and the stench of shit and disinfectant in the hospital where my daughter lay dying, when I learned how life and love can also waste away and die…
and thoughts of shit spark smells of steaming cow flaps in Scottish pastures through which Mary Lee and I hike, and aromas of shawarma, spices, and pita bread mingled with the dust of pilgrims in the Old City of Jerusalem, and the sweet scent of apple tea in Turkey and animal musk on the Serengeti and incense wafting up from the altar into the stony steeple of Iona Abbey—reminders that I not only didn’t die, but flourished—
and the smell of Mary Lee lying beside me in the morning, and the fresh, slightly sweet scent of our newborn grandchild, and before I know it, going into the school building to pick up that grandchild where the fragrance of chalk and cleaners and young bodies take me back to my years as a public-school teacher—intimations that love is stronger than death…
and although I’m surrounded by the smells of dead and dying vegetation and the lingering sickly scent of Mupirocin with which I swabbed my nose prior to and after heart surgery, the decay upon which I walk and which I smell teems with the bouquet of resurrection.
As readers of this blog know, my daughter Laurie died at the age of 18 from a rare cancer. In November, seven months after the cancer was first diagnosed, she went into Eastern Maine Medical Center. Living 120 miles away, I took a leave of absence from my teaching job and moved into a Ronald McDonald House where I spent the next two months with my daughter until she died on December 23.
Since then, each November as the days grow darker and colder, I can feel my body chemistry change. I’ve coped in many ways, but the most helpful has been through writing. It’s no accident that the first Geriatric Pilgrim blog appeared in November 2015.
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Sonnet for November
Novembers, I would drive my daughter past
Men in blaze-orange caps, crouched on a hill,
Their 30-30’s sighted, set to kill
Most anything, just so the gun would blast.
My heart began to flutter, then beat fast
As we drove by them—silent, savage, still—
And I could feel the air around us chill.
I’d think, how long, dear God, will this month last?
But I’ve since learned of other ways to die,
And russet hills now fill with memories:
Her gentle, kind, abbreviated life.
These days, I treasure the November sky
Which broadens once the leaves drop from the trees.
I’m walking the grass loop around our housing development. Under the power line toward the community garden, I pass through what is now a shoulder-high host of Queen Anne’s Lace, golden rod, milk weed, bracken, and many other plants I can’t name. The flies swarm. The sweet songs of the cardinals and tufted titmouses (titmice?) have given way to the screeching of blue jays and crows. Monarch butterflies flit from flower to flower. The air smells ripe. Shadows crawl like the incoming tide over the landscape. Summer is ending.
And I feel myself coming alive. Beginning again.
The reason is simple. For seventy-five years—as a student, as a teacher—the golden rod, the lengthening shadows, the Monarchs, have meant the beginning of another school year. More than New Year’s Eve, more than the first warm day of the year, this is the time when, at some deep cellular level, I can feel myself waking up, ready to start anew.
It’s a good feeling. At my age, it’s easier to focus on endings than beginnings. I now celebrate—if that’s the right word—more birthdays of the dead than of the living: my grandparents, my parents, my daughter, my first wife, close friends. Ended are my long hikes, long distant driving, lifting anything over forty pounds, staying up after midnight, jumping into bed with my wife after a sexy movie (jumping anywhere, for that matter), five-course meals, Cuban cigars, Laphroaig Scotch… the list grows longer each year.
But as T.S. Eliot wrote, “In the end is my beginning.” (Hey, I’m an old English lit teacher, I remember stuff like that.) You can’t begin something until something else ends. School can’t start until summer ends (Yeah, I know, there’s summer school, but I’m trying to make an analogy. Don’t confuse me with technicalities.) It took the end of a disastrous year of studying forestry in college for me to begin my studies in English (which is why I’m quoting T.S. Eliot and not The Journal of Forestry.) It took the end of an unhappy 20-year marriage for me to begin a happy going-on-forty-year one. It took the end of a career in public education for me to go back to school for an MFA, write a couple of books, a bunch of essays, and going on nine years’ worth of blog posts.
So, what will I begin this year? Well, Mary Lee and I have a couple of trips planned (knock on wood: last year, we had three planned and they were all canceled). I will scrape and repaint my front door and clean out the garage.
But the biggest change I want to make is with The Geriatric Pilgrim.
When I began these blogs, I was fascinated by the idea of pilgrimage: how a pilgrimage differs from a vacation, or from going on a retreat, or from study programs (what I called “edu-cations”). Besides traveling to retreat houses and other spiritual sites in the United States, Canada, the British Isles, Israel, Turkey, and Africa, I collected pages of definitions of pilgrimage and of common characteristics of pilgrimages. I read a raft of books about various pilgrimages people had made.
Along the way, I became intrigued by my fascination with pilgrims and pilgrimages. What was in it for me?
Stature of a “Jakobspilger,” or St. James’s pilgrim: Speyer, Germany
Well, probably the main thing at the time was the idea that pilgrims are often searching for a source of healing. As you know if you’ve read these blogs, I was looking for healing after the death of my eighteen-year-old daughter from a rare cancer. And I found writing about the various pilgrimages Mary Lee and I had made even more healing than the pilgrimages themselves.
Gradually, I began to realize that pilgrimage is a frame of mind—an attitude of curiosity, detachment, wonder. It’s “traveling light,” as one writer says, of risk, of living in liminal space—leaving one location but not yet arriving at another—of exploration, the end of which, to quote T.S. Eliot again, “Will be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time.”
Since COVID arrived, with all its restrictions on travel, followed by my 80th birthday, with its expanded waistline and diminished abilities, my blogs have focused more on applying the lessons of pilgrimage to my current life of walks in the neighboring woods, planting peas, tomatoes, and pumpkins in our community garden, and of exploring the twelve steps of my Al Anon program. This, too, has been healing.
But now I find myself no longer as interested in finding new ways to describe my pilgrimage, as I am in describing and exploring in more depth the landscape through which I’m traveling, a landscape that is always changing, sometimes in ways that please me—autumn color is just around the corner, the grandchildren are growing—sometimes in ways that piss me off or frighten me—the start of my favorite woods walk has been clear-cut, I’m finding it difficult to sing without coughing.
Writing about these joys and sorrows, I find I’m writing more poetry. I’ve just finished an on-line workshop for poets, and one of the highlights of my week is another on-line group of poets from all over the country, where we share our favorite poetry as well as poems we’ve written. I’m now subjecting my longtime writing group here in town to my poems.
So, I’m going to be posting more poetry here in these blogs as well as other experiments—prose poems, flash fiction and nonfiction—trying to look more closely at the physical and emotional landscapes through which I’m now traveling.
The way I see it, my pilgrimage continues, but the lens through which I’m seeing it and the voice in which I’m describing it is changing.
I’m excited to see where this journey will take me.
And hoping you’ll continue to join me.
So, let part of my life end, and another begin.
As Quakers say, when one door closes another opens.
I’m aware of how old I am when I recall that one of my chores when I was kid was to lug old newspapers, magazines, cards and letters, anything paper, out to the old oil barrel in the back yard and burn them. No curbside pickup in those days. (Hell, our town didn’t even have curbs.) It was not a job I liked. Sometimes, I burned myself; sometimes my fingers went numb in the cold; sometimes it took me two or three or more kitchen matches to get a fire started, depending on the wind, which sometimes blew acrid smoke in my eyes.
In those days, fire was a physical force to be endured, and I was more than a little afraid of it.
Sunday School didn’t help. Mrs. Raines warned that if I wasn’t good and didn’t do my chores, I might go to Hell, which was a place of fire and brimstone (I didn’t know what brimstone was, but I was pretty sure it burned)—words I often recall when I think of the fires around me these days: the ecocide of our planet, the continued threat of nuclear annihilation, riots on our streets, countless false messiahs fanning the flames of our differences.
A dozen years or so after Sunday School, I saw worlds—or at least woods— go up in flames. I worked for the U.S. Forest Service on a regional Hotshot Crew based in McCall, Idaho. (The term “hotshot” describes those who work on the hottest part of a forest fire.) Looking back, it was hot, dangerous, and grueling work, and my lungs carry the scars from those fires.
But at the same time, I loved the physical challenge. (Hey, I was 20!) And there’s been nothing in my life like the thrill of watching a forest fire racing through the tops of trees. It was frightening, but at the same time enthralling.
I also learned that despite Smoky the Bear’s telling me, “Only you can prevent forest fires!” (What a burden to put on kids!) most of the fires I fought were caused by lightning strikes and that the occasional fire was actually good for the forest. When flames consume organic matter, nutrients are released back into the soil. Fires can thin the canopy allowing more sunlight to reach the forest floor, encouraging the growth of native species and eliminating invasive weeds. Fires can promote species diversity. (Some species, such as the karner blue butterfly and the wood lily depend on fire to survive.) Fires can improve habitats for wildlife by reducing dead vegetation and stimulating new growth, which can provide food and cover.
During my first marriage, I used to help my then father-in-law burn brush in the winter. It was an all-day activity. We gathered all the limbs and underbrush we’d cleared during the year from around his house, piled them on a couple of old tires filled with gasoline and set it ablaze. I was still in good physical shape, and I enjoyed the exercise. But I experienced another aspect of fire as well. Poking at the burning brush in the gathering darkness, gazing into the flickering shadows cast by the fire on the surrounding snow, I sensed my ice age ancestors dancing around the flames which protected them from wild animals and the cold.
A couple of weeks ago, Mary Lee and I watched two fireflies sparking the summer night. A little research told me that fireflies produce light in special organs in their abdomens to find mates. When a female sees a male making a signal, she flashes back. Then the two reciprocally signal as the male flies down to her. If everything goes right, they mate.
All I could think of was the Bob Seeger song, “They got the fire down below.”
Another kind of fire I remember.
Now, it’s been sixty years since I’ve seen a live forest fire, let alone fought one, and probably forty since I’ve burned a pile of brush. I’m tired out after an hour in the garden. Often these days, a romantic evening is playing Scrabble or Canasta until 9:00 p.m. But I’m still drawn to fire: I can spend hours staring at the flames in our fireplace.
I’ve also become more aware of what I think of as the fire of Presence, represented, I think, in the Bible’s Old Testament by the burning bush that drew the attention of Moses and in the New Testament by the Holy Spirit descending upon Jesus’s followers as “Divided tongues, as of fire….”
One of my old spiritual directors used to tell a story from the Desert Fathers in which a young monk said to his teacher, “Abba, as far as I can, I say my little office, I fast a little, I pray and meditate, I live in peace as far as I can, I purify my thoughts. What else can I do?”
His teacher stood up and stretched his hands toward heaven. His fingers became like ten lamps of fire. And he said to him, “If you will, you can become all flame.”
So far, the closest I’ve come to experiencing this fire happened during the last two months of my daughter’s life. After spending the day in the hospital by Laurie’s bedside, I’d go each afternoon to the hospital chapel. I was almost always the only person there. Upon entering, I’d light two pillar candles on the altar, sit in the front row of chairs, and stare between the candles through a large round window looking out over the river. After a while, the candles would sometimes seem to glow more brightly, their light dancing. The flames would come together, enfolded by the stained glass around the window. Then, I too would become enfolded in a fiery feeling of being scoured of fear and anger and shame, which allowed me to face the next day.
These days, as I sit by our fireplace, it’s hard not to identify with the dying flames. But I realize even glowing embers can still, like forest fires and fiery brush piles, like altar candles in a hospital chapel, purge away what is false, promote new growth, light someone’s way in this burning world.
The Geriatric Pilgrim: Traveling the Landscape of Faith and Grief 