On my birthday, my mom and I drive to get facials from my angel of an esthetician, Angela. In the car, we talk with our makeup-less faces about all sorts of things. I notice her rosy cheeks and the wisdom in her eyes, but also her youthfulness. At sixty-nine, she still feels like the same mom who held me when she, too, was newly thirty-nine.
Under the LED lights, Angela’s hypoallergenic blue gloves glide gently over my skin, without product. I wonder what she is feeling for, what she is noticing, as I talk at her. Because she is a death doula, we often come to the topic of death, which I find equally soothing as the moment she wraps a heavy hot towel around my neck and face.
She says something that catches my attention, and when my mom and I get back in the car to drive home, I pull out my notes app to quickly jot down what I recall from it:
“When you lose both of your parents, you learn what yearning is.”
Her father, who she was terribly close to, had just passed. But it was her mother, with whom she had a more complicated relationship, who appeared most vividly in her mind.
I picture her, guided by her own words, on her back porch. Sunlight bleeding through oak trees, the wind tugging at her weepy attention. She is spiritual, so she connected her mother’s presence to animals and the elements. But she admitted she was getting lost in it. “I could tell I was in danger.”
“It’s easy to want to stay sad, I think,” I say. “I don’t know what it’s like to lose my parents yet, but I could see where I would want to cling to my grief.”
We continue to talk, but my brain keeps circling back to the concept of yearning.
Later, I think about being a little girl, hiding under the deep maroon velvet chairs of my grandparents’ entryway. My memory has distorted this story (I know memory does that), but I can’t quite trace how much of it is invention. I was maybe nine year’s old, aware my grandfather’s cancer would take him from us soon, and that with his death everything in our family would change. I remember lying on the floor, in white tights and a hunter green ruffled dress, imagining this death and not fully understanding it.
Everything did change. His death, our family’s bright, musical, and charismatic patriarch, set off a domino effect of circumstances. The collapses (more illnesses in our family, more deaths, moving away from everything I knew) stirred up an emptiness that still feels impossible to fill. Here I am with Angela, naming it truly for the first time.
It was a strange relief to hear it spoken aloud. We never really worked through how she yanked herself out of danger; maybe she’s still a work in progress, settling into her mid-fifties with humor and grace and curiosity I want to mirror. I love talking to her, and I love how she sees me.
Yearning is a beautiful thing. It lets us connect with parts of ourselves we might otherwise avoid. But it can also be dangerous, as she said, if you stay there too long. Even if the pull is the desire to be connected to those we lost, or those we couldn’t know better. As much as it can make us see big and important parts of ourselves, it can also carry us away.
I would rather be here, talking to the people with me, grabbing my mother’s hand after I save that note. Offering the parts of me that feel empty so they can fill them. Hoping I do the same.
(Daily Writing 094)
Thoughts?