“stuck on hope”

January 1, 2014February 23, 2014amybiancolli random philosophizing, spirituality, Uncategorized 2 Comments

Father Bob, a good friend and a great priest, said this in my kitchen. The two of us were eating cake and cranberry juice, talking about loss. We agreed that it sucks. Burying those we love, saying goodbye too soon, too soon, too soon, weathering all the hailstorms of grief that follow, trying to believe that life can still emerge into daylight, drumming up the faith and foolishness to uncurl from a ball and head out the damned creaking door for another day: it’s all too much. It’s madness, really.

And yet we do it, because there is no better option. Correction: There is no other option. Hope is all we have. Even when we’re exhausted and drooping from effort, even when we don’t know where we’re going or why we’re going there, we plod blindly on. And in this blind plodding we put our faith.

Father Bob and I were chewing on this and sucking down juice when I asked why any of us should believe that life might hand out anything but pain. We must be delusional, I said. Here we are, minding our business, tending our loved ones, laughing when we can — as R.E.M. put it, “lost in our little lives” — when fate or God or the cosmos or bum bloody mindless luck clobbers us broadside with tragedy. Why should anybody ever expect anything else?

“I guess,” he replied, “you just have to be stuck on hope. I guess that’s the answer.”

I was recalling this conversation today as I rode a surge of optimism on the first fresh morning of 2014. It was Cicero who observed, “Where there’s life, there’s hope,” but the reverse is true, too. Where there’s hope, there’s life. It’s a syllogism. Life=hope. Hope=life. If we just keep hoping, if we just keep plodding, the schlep of life will take care of itself. It might even clobber us broadside with joy.

facing the slope

December 30, 2013January 4, 2018amybiancolli family, random philosophizing, Uncategorized, widowhood, winter 2 Comments

“Ames,” says my brother Danny, somewhere near the windy top of Killington. “I want you to ski this black diamond with moguls. I’ll show you how to do it. You’ll be fine.”

You want to me to ski a black diamond with moguls, I repeat back. You’ll show me how to do it. I’ll be fine.

“You’ll be fine.”

Ummm.

It’s around 3:30 Saturday afternoon, we’ve been skiing all day on sucky icy lumpy conditions, and I’m wrecked. Every joint and muscle and piece of bone in my body hurts, including the tips of my pinkies. A few hours earlier I wiped out trying to turn on a lump of wet, ungroomed crap passing for snow, so I’m not in the best shape for any kind of black diamond, be it accessorized with moguls or not.

But Danny’s insistent. And he’s smiling. And he’s my brother. And I haven’t died so far today, so I’m on a streak of good fortune. Continue reading →

to do or not to do a not-to-do list

December 28, 2013February 23, 2014amybiancolli "housework", Uncategorized, widowhood 4 Comments

Each and every day, I make a list. Much of this covers basic shit likely to land on anyone’s list: go shopping, pay bills, call friends, make doctors’ appointments, blah biddy blah biddy blah. Some of this is more specific and idiosyncratic: Most people’s lists don’t include a reminder to re-work the fingerings on “Georgia on My Mind” in time for a violin lesson, for example.

The lists are long. Since Chris died, they’ve gotten longer, as the carefully delegated jobs defining every marriage went kablooey with his suicide, dumping piles of exciting new shit on me and me alone. Car shit: mine. Lawn care and pruning shit: shit: mine. Fixing-shit-around-the-house shit: mine.

At first, I made these lists with fullest, proudest, perfectest, stupidest confidence that I would scratch off all or most of the items on them. I did not. This realization, over time, began to depress me until I had a minor (really, really, minor) epiphany and understood that these itemized scraps of paper I labor over each morning are not, in fact, to-do lists. Instead they are not-to-do-lists: lists that I am confident I will ignore. Writing them each day with this fullest, proudest, perfectest confidence liberates me, because I no longer have to feel crappy about my failures to do everything — or even anything — there itemized.

This is all part of my constant effort to lower the bar, which also includes my nightly moral checklist (did I kill anyone?); my most common parental directive (“don’t break your neck”); and my radically enlightened philosophy of housecleaning. Early on in my efforts at F.S.O., I recognized that most of the S. I felt compelled to F.O. wasn’t as pressing as I first thought; if I never figured out an easy way to unroll and haul and wrangle the area rugs into place every winter, which Chris always did and Chris always loved and mattered so dearly to Chris, that was okay. I was allowed to keep them unrolled and unhauled. I was allowed to keep the floors bare year-round. I was allowed to not-do whatever I needed to not-do to get by.

At some point, I may decide to evade my chores without bothering to enumerate them. If I’m all about lowering the bar, and make no mistake, I am, just ask my children, then why devise a list at all? Why not just wake up every day saying, “Screw it. I don’t care what I forget. I’ll forget EVERYTHING! Take that, burdens and responsibilities and self-appointed tasks! Take that, day!”

I’ll tell you why: because it gives me a sense of control. If I scribble “Buy mop heads” and “practice Schradieck” and “call Aunt Charlotte” in Sharpie on the back of a balled-up Stewart’s receipt, then I have, first of all, a wafer-thin but nonetheless improved chance of actually accomplishing these things. But more than that, I have one small whit of power during one small moment over one small particle of my life. For the 38 seconds it takes me to compile my not-to-do-list, I have a sense of order.

Until, sometime around lunchtime, when I lose it — and then, in search of that same sense of order, I make another.

the expanding universe

December 26, 2013February 23, 2014amybiancolli family, random philosophizing, Uncategorized, widowhood 8 Comments

This Christmas, as usual, my kids and I joined Chris’s family for a day of eating and laughing followed by yet more eating and yet more laughing, with breaks in between for energetic gift-giving and weak passes at digestion. While he was alive, I considered them the best in-laws anyone could ask for: caring, attentive, generous, never intrusive, always warm. After he died, they conveyed to me, in gestures and words, that my husband’s death was not an end to my bond with his family. In the midst of all that hurt, I was profoundly grateful to realize that I hadn’t lost them, too.

My universe can’t shrink any more than it has to. I want it to expand. And strangely, despite all the losses, it continues to. This is how it functions. This is its inclination, flinging outward from a central moment — the Big Bang, or the moment of creation, or whatever you want to call the giant cosmic spewing that kicked it (and us) into gear.

I happen to believe that a Someone set it off, but even if I didn’t, I’d still take comfort in the knowledge that, no matter what interplanetary flotsam we encounter, we’re forever moving forward. Even when our lives contract so grievously after a loss, they’re still expanding. Even when we seem to have derailed entirely, skidding off toward some forbidding landscape, we’re still going somewhere. Old relationships deepen and change. New friendships form. New family arrives in unexpected and miraculous ways.

It was Chris who remarked, “Amy, for someone whose family is dead, you have a lot of relatives.” He made this remark about 15 years ago, but I’ve recalled it often these past two, whenever I found myself in the welcoming embrace of his siblings, their spouses, their sons. Soon we’ll be seeing my extended and splendiferous non-blood family, the loved ones I acquired as a kid. How my universe expanded when I met them. How it expanded again when I married Chris.

And now, two of his nephews — my nephews — are getting married. I would say their fiancees are about to become members of the family, but they already are. They’re already eating and laughing and gift-giving. It was some of their food I went on to digest last night; if baked s’more cookies and lemon bars can’t seal the deal, nothing will. As the universe expands, so does my stomach.

the fish has a name! sort of.

December 14, 2013February 23, 2014amybiancolli polls, Uncategorized 4 Comments

You’ve got to be kidding me.

Before I announce the long-anticipated results of the First and Last Annual Name My Goldfish Competition of 2013, I would like to note that my kitchen is apparently not the steaming incubator of democratic spirit that I assumed it to be. I had approached my kids with this pet-nomer undertaking before floating it on the blog, and they agreed in principle, but the realpolitik proved thornier than anticipated; as we learned from the collapse of the Soviet Union, democracy is easier said than done. When they heard the results, they rebeled.

But a deal is a deal. A poll is a poll. A dumbass idea is a dumbass idea. And so, with no more ado, if any of this qualifies as ado, the winner of our thunderously important exercise is: “Sushi.”

For this my kids and I have no one to blame but ourselves, as the four of us selected it as a finalist despite the fact that it is, truly, vicious bordering on abusive: How is naming a pet after a foodstuff derived from its flesh any less cruel than not naming it at all? It’s like deciding to call a pony “horse meat.”

But the people have spoken. A tiny number of people with an especially morbid sense of humor, but all the same. They are people. And they have spoken. Now, whether this means we actually call the poor creature “sushi” is a matter only history, and my children, can decide.

vote here! goldfish poll!

December 7, 2013February 23, 2014amybiancolli polls, Uncategorized 1 Comment

After deep linguistic analysis and months, I mean seconds, of rigorous and discerning discussion with my three children, I am pleased to announce finalists in the First and Last Annual Name My Goldfish Competition of 2013.

Some of these names, “Sushi” included, were suggested in comments right here on the blog. Others, such as “Chunk,” were suggested in a thread on my Facebook page. “Pudge” is my daughter Madeleine’s idea. The idea of highlighting the plight of this sad creature to begin with was suggested by my friend Jane, whom I should have credited from the start but didn’t because I’m an ungrateful and insensitive wretch. If I weren’t, I would have named the fish years ago.

Go ahead and vote. Just once will do. Voting will close same time tomorrow, unless I change my mind and extend it, because I am flighty as well as ungrateful and insensitive, and because, as you are no doubt aware, the First and Last Annual Name My Goldfish Competition of 2013 is bigger news than the Grammys. So you’re all clamoring for the chance to express your opinions on piscine pet monikers. So I’m going to shut up now. So you can vote. Go on. Vote.