Soul Flier

How could you have grown up so fast, when the day you were born, you, grown up, seemed a million years away? 

Syd and me when she was about 13.
Photo credit: Jon Aronin

How did you get so capable, because when you were two, you needed me for everything? 

How could you have needed me for everything, then barged ahead anyway, my pigheaded angel-face, convinced that you needed me for nothing? 

And how did you get so strong, my fairy warrior princess, when there was a time that you worried about everything?

Remember that day on the bed? You said you were so afraid to die. I tried to think what could have made you that anxious. Then, you spoke of stresses from school, your parents' divorce, and unreliable friends. You cried about missing your grandma, leaving your childhood, losing your home, and growing old. 

No wonder you were frightened; you'd worried yourself full circle to confront your own mortality. And we went around and around and around, I trying to comfort you and you still not comforted.

Then I, a discontented agnostic, struggling to believe, said the last thing I could think of that might help, that after I died, I would watch over you, and that when you died, I would watch then, too, and fly down from Heaven just in time to catch your soul, that I would hold it tight against me and pilot it to Heaven. 

So far, my help hadn't helped, so I braced for your scoff. 

But you said, "You promise?"

And I said, "I promise."

When Robin Flew Away: The Death of Robin Williams

Updated on February 16, 2024

On my personal scale of the sad and unthinkable, Robin Williams' suicide is off the scale. In fact, on its way to being off the scale, it flattened the scale, smashed the scale, and obliterated the scale under morbid, coarse, repugnant tonnage. 

Image source: stockadobe.com

I say all that as a lowly fan, a woman whose existence was unknown to him, a woman who imagined that he was, in some way, ethereal. 

My favorite Williams film, and one of my favorite movies ever, is The Fisher King. In it, Williams plays Parry, a homeless man with mental illness who lies on his back in Central Park, nude, watching the clouds. 

I saw The Fisher King only once because I was so emotionally wrung out by it that I never quite had it in me to watch it again. Just thinking about Parry, so vulnerable, an innocent among monsters, nearly makes me sob again all these many years later. And it seemed to me then as it seems to me now, that there was a lot of Williams in Parry - or maybe it's the other way around.

When he died, people said they were shocked but not surprised, that there often seemed to be "something about him." My inept description of that "something" is wistful melancholy, a look I liked to think meant that he knew more than all of us mere mortals combined, and that the knowledge weighed heavy. Sometimes that look came with a faint smile, a barely perceptible upward curve of the lips, a smile that belied resignation. 

At other times, he was the impish, pesky child you couldn't bring yourself to punish, and, when the role warranted it, he looked absolutely chilling. All of which unearths a question: When Williams looked in the mirror, which Williams looked back?

When Robin Williams was on, he was very, very on, as though God had strapped an Acme rocket to his backside and lit the fuse Himself. How his mouth kept up with his mind is beyond me, as is any grasp of how he improvised so brilliantly.

At first, I had a romanticized notion of William's death, that he had figured out the meaning of life, identified what lies beyond our universe, and, unlike Parry, grew weary of clouds. I told myself that after analyzing the sad reality of this situation, Williams concluded that it was time for him to go. 

I know now that Lewy body dementia, was revealed via autopsy. I know now that he was very ill in his body and his mind, and I know now that that was what led to his death and not some cosmic, dark, angelic, insight beyond the grasp of Earthbound brains. Any way you look at it, Robin Williams cashed in his millions in chips and left the rest of us flat broke. 

Some talking-head pundit asked what Williams' suicide would mean to his legacy. I once thought that question was ridiculous. William's death was a separate issue, and his body of work would always stand. 

Until, for me, it didn't. 

Because I soon realized that I could no longer watch Robin Williams movies and that I could barely tolerate even brief clips. Almost 10 years later, I still can't, and trying to just feels too damn sad. Maybe that's a different kind of legacy, and if so, it too feels too damn sad. 

I wish Robin Williams could come back healthy, happy, and adlibbing an Elizabethan blue streak, but he can't. As for me, I have children to praise, bad poetry to write, and a million other things that tether me soundly and happily to life. It seems I like having an Earthbound brain. 

Besides, he took Parry with him, and someone has to watch the clouds. 

  

Bridge Years

The day that would have been my mother's 93rd birthday passed in January. The second anniversary of her death fell in February. She is still the first thing to slip into my consciousness at waking and the last to cross the backs of my eyelids, with the good and the bad and the slights and the love, just before I sleep. 

I have two kids in their upper teens, and lately I'm comparing my mother's situation when I was a young adult to the ones I face with my children. As I write this, my daughter is taking a "bridge year," in her case, a break between high school and college. Like many young people, she’s anxious about setting sail and hesitates over her options, even though I point out - more often than is helpful - that she doesn’t have to declare a major until later. Next year, if she's ready, she'll start at community college then head to Michigan State. That's the loose plan anyway, and it's given us a lot of time together. When we laugh, we are so like my mother and I, all those years ago.

Though I lived on campus and loved dorm life, I was home much of the time. I expected my parents to pick me up on Friday afternoons and take me home for the weekend - almost every weekend - a three-hour round trip. On Sunday nights, as though for the last time, I'd hug and kiss them and shout goodbyes, and they'd be gone - until they came back five days later. If they felt even the slightest discontent at doing all that driving, it never showed. All I saw were two happy, tired people. They would ask me how my week had been, and I, a merry egotist, would spend the next two days telling them. Much of that time was spent curled up next to my mother in my parents' bed, spilling the tea about all the things my father would rather not hear. We'd lie in that bed laughing and talking until my bone-weary dad would come in to say I really should be in my own bed.    

As to bridge years, I took one, too - between earning a BA and earning an income. My parents approved, provided I used that year to develop my writing skills, skills I'd just recently discovered. I'd sit at our dining table, portable Brother typewriter before me, plagiarizing a book on Laurel and Hardy. The plagiarizing wasn't intentional, and I'm sure my manuscript contained some embryo of an original thought. Still, if they ever peeked over my shoulder while I typed, my parents must have slipped away afterward to weep.  

I landed a full-time job as an employment agent when I was 23. I had gone to an agency for help finding a job and was hired on the spot. And that job proved to be a keystone in my career, so the bridge in my bridge year didn't collapse after all, except that I didn't need writing skills until much later. 

The other night I dreamed that I was an adult living with my parents when it occurs to me that I really should get a job. My mother asks if that means I'll be getting my own place, too. I tell her that I'll live at home while I train for the ideal job, and even after, since it will take time to save a down payment on a house. Upon learning that I plan to move out eventually, my mother sounds lighter than she has in years as she chats on the phone, sharing the news with friends. Later in the dream, I'm telling my father that he is absolutely correct to throw out all the knick-knacks and curio shelves before he redecorates the house, and then I question his choice of wall paint. I honestly did dream that dream exactly as described and hope I wasn't that big a jerk in real life. 

My mother and I were always close and are even now, in our own way, since some days she feels as real to me as if she were alive. As she lay dying, I drove almost 600 miles to surprise her. When I walked into her room, it was late, the lights dim, and two aides were struggling to make her more comfortable. They weren't struggling because she was hard to please; my mother was unfailingly appreciative and expressed her gratitude generously. But there wasn't a part of her body that wasn't breaking or broken. She was so ill and trying so hard to communicate her needs, that she didn't see me slip in. I sat by the window and when one of the aides looked up, I signaled her to keep quiet. When they left, my mother lay there, eyes closed. 

"Hi, Mom," I said in my best hushed-but-happy tones. It seemed that even a voice, too loud or harsh, might tear the tender body in the bed. She opened her eyes, looked toward me and started to cry. I cried too. I cried harder when, she said, "Oh, Mom. Mom." 

I gathered her in my arms and kissed the top of her head.

"It's Teece," I murmured against her hair. "I love you. I'm here now. I'm here."

"Oh, I'm so glad," she sobbed, and I wondered if she minded that my tears had wet her scalp.  You wonder a lot of odd things when you hold a dying parent. I doubt she minded, though. Very few things had ever bothered her. It took something as big as death to trip her up. For a while, I regretted telling her it was me when she thought I was her mother, but I think for her, by then I was child and mother. Besides, this was her bridge year, and who am I to say she didn't see her mother?    

Now that I've thrashed all this around in my head a few thousand times, I've vowed that the next time someone tells me about their kid who's studying abroad, nailing down a second master's, I will proudly share that my child might be living with me for years. 

Swimming Toward the Christmas Lights

I'm writing this on Christmas Eve at the end of one of the most challenging years I can remember. 

My mother passed away in February, a friend died by suicide in September, another died the night before Thanksgiving, an old schoolmate lost her baby granddaughter to a rare genetic disorder, and another friend lost one sister only to have another nearly die in a car accident just weeks later.

And that wasn't all of it. There were other serious illnesses and even deaths among those close to me this year. 

Then, like wolves, arthritis took me down, and these days I use a cane on bad days.

Christmas has a way of stroking our cheeks with the faux fur of holiday stockings, then snapping our bare backsides with Santa's big belt. We find joy in how children wonder over Christmas and then grieve over our own memories of it and just about everything else - the sad, the sweet, the bittersweet. Those memories crystallize into something needle-like and pierce straight into us like thorns on mistletoe. 

A very wise woman once told me that something positive comes from everything that happens to us, no matter how tragic. After some introspection, I'm thinking she's right.

I challenge you to find at least one good thing to come from any memory haunting you this Christmas. Whether it's a lesson learned, a more compassionate self, a ripple effect that's touched others in positive ways, I believe you can find at least that one good thing and maybe more. 

Take me and my arthritis. I don't know how this'll all go down in the long run, but for now, I'm taking it as a scary, painful wake-up call to lose weight, eat better, and move more. I've joined my local Y and am reaping the benefits of swimming, including less pain, more flexibility and a bit more muscle definition in my back. And I'm learning that there are lots of treatment options available to me and that remission is a real possibility. 

I'm also looking at my cane with new eyes and finding that it almost cozies up the entryway. It leans against a table that holds candles and family photos. I think of my Aunt Izzy who lived not only with arthritis but a severe hand tremor. But those things didn't stop her from cooking and baking and lighting our lives with laughter and wit and fun well into her nineties. She's the one who smiled at her nieces and nephews just before she passed, telling them that she was having "such a wonderful death."

I'm choosing - and some days it's hard - to believe that having arthritis might ultimately boost my quality of life as well as my longevity because it's forcing me to make better choices about my health. 

And you? What light has come to you because of the dark? 

Whatever it is, may it guide you to a better Christmas - this year and for all the years to come. 

Honey, People Like You Should Never Go to Those Places By Themselves

Recently I lost my mother. In its grief, my brain scrambles to recall details of her more recent self while things that happened years ago spring to mind in stark detail. My father, who died nearly 15 years ago, is often part of these recollections.

Image copyright, Teece Aronin

I have a cat named Kitt (hang in there; my parents will be back soon) who lives for the times she can spring onto a newly purchased or freshly laundered bedspread, smear her scent all over it, knead it, and just generally break it in for me. 

I also own a quilt, hand-stitched by my great-grandmother but stored away because Kitt would love to break it in for me, too.

The other day I brought home a store-bought quilt that reminded me of the one I keep in storage. The bonus was the sewn-on strips of colorful fabric and the rumply texture that would make any breaking-in Kitt could do less noticeable. 

The second the quilt hit the bed, so did Kitt. She rolled and stretched and followed her usual routine until the other usual thing happened: she got a claw caught in the quilt. With her arm stretched over her head, she freed herself with a thread-popping snap and I thought how badly I wanted to roll her up in the quilt and chuck her like a padded torpedo straight into a dumpster. Then I remembered a mess I got myself into with cats more than 20 years ago - and this is where my parents come in. 

I had just bought a little house. What would be nicer, I thought, than to adopt a cat to share it with? One weekend I drove to the nearest animal shelter and saw that the place was loaded with caged cats. An employee strolled over and pointed out a cage with four cats inside. Those four cats, she whispered, would be put down the next day if they didn't find homes this afternoon. I put my hand against the cage and one of the cats pressed its paw against my palm. I told the woman I'd take them all, keeping two and finding homes for two. It seemed so reasonable. 

Before I knew it, I was driving home with boxes of cats in the backseat. "Ninety-nine boxes of cats in the car! Ninety-nine boxes of cats!" I sang. The cats sang too. It felt good to save a life and saving four lives felt four times better. I got home, carried the boxes into the house two by two, then opened them gently so that the cats could become accustomed to their new environment. Cats are funny that way, you know; very timid when introduced to new surroundings.

After charging from their boxes like a swarm of killer bees, the cats made what appeared to be a coordinated attack on my house. One of them shimmied up the drapes where he hung like a spotted aerialist before flinging himself against the blinds. 

"Oh, my God, they're feral!" I screamed, as afraid of them as if they were bats or bears, even. I called my parents and blubbered into the phone. Somewhere in there, my mother caught the words cats and feral and figured out the rest. 

"Don't worry," she said, "I'll make some phone calls. We'll see you tomorrow."

The next morning my parents were at my door wearing reassuring smiles and leather gardening gloves. They helped me get the genies back in the bottles and loaded them in their car. My mother had found a woman who took in stray and feral cats. 

Before they left, my father gazed down at me with a loving but serious expression. "Honey," he said, "people like you should never go to those places by themselves." 

I don't get myself into feral cat predicaments anymore, but the reason for that is . . . well, I don't know exactly what the reason for that is because I adore cats, even ferals provided I know what I'm in for. But I like to think it's because I always listened to my parents. 

If they were with me now, I'd gladly listen to them all over again - even if the topic was feral cats.   

Heart Murmur

When my mother was 91, sick, weak, and giving up her life, I wanted to tell the healthcare workers the things I knew that they did not.  

That she once had a heart-shaped face, flawless skin, and was a redhead with freckled arms. 

That I had pictures of her, looking beautiful, like a starlet, playing badminton in her bathing suit and reclining in the sun. 

That she was so quick to laugh - but never at someone's expense, that she met people where they were, openminded, fully expecting to embrace them, and that, even in my teens, when I "should have been" rebelling, I would curl up with her at the end of the day and spill every drop of tea in the pot.   

Her caregivers could not have known that when I was seven and had a tonsillectomy, she spent the night by my hospital bed because the staff couldn't get her to go home - this, in the days when kids were kept overnight, and their parents booted out. 

Her nurses and techs knew none of that and were kind to her anyway. But one impatient word, one careless yank on her gown, one exasperated sigh in her direction, and I would defend my mother as she had defended me in the face of child-hating neighbors with perfect yards and the first-grade teacher who said I couldn't read - with all the conviction of an outraged mother bear. 

Because our days came and went like heartbeats, but then there was a murmur, and now I saw my mother as she had once seen me. 

Defending Facebook: My "Charmed" Life

If Facebook gets you down, makes you feel your relationships, your family, your furniture, your holidays don't quite measure up, or if you think everyone on there is a shallow bunch of fakers, please understand: You aren't privy to everybody's backstory. 

On one of many road trips back to see my mother. 
Photo copyright, Teece Aronin

I post pictures of my kids baking cookies as the dog watches with flour on her face. I make sure you wake to photos of my cat, stretched in feline repose across my bed. I choose pictures that show most cheerfully or poignantly or humorously how well my kids and I get along.

What you don't see is everything that came before, like a tsunami crushing our lives. Life fell apart, and what you see on Facebook is the repair work, the reassembly, the cleanup - with me, the mother, who never knew a damned thing about how to do any of this - as team captain by default.

There was the end of a marriage to the man who fathered these children, who helped build a home only the most tangled of crossed stars could destroy and did. There was me scrambling to find a better job before our house sold out from under us. There was me networking in two different states, first the kids' home state and next mine, to find that job. 

There was the kids having to leave their father. There was the kids having to leave their grandmother. There was me having to leave my mother when I'd always planned to be there as she aged. There was the night before we left when she broke the "no open flame" rule at her assisted living facility, lit a votive, and joined hands with us around the flame. Then she spoke with a smile of how grateful she was that we had been near her all those years and how she would pray for our trip to be safe.

Then there was the 500-mile move away from every warm thing my kids had ever known.

There were the months on end where I swore I was piloting the kids through hell only to learn that they were guiding me. There were the endless kindnesses of family and friends who took us in, shored us up, and gave us hope.

There was Facebook, which became a way to document the restoration. The place I laid our trips to cider mills and pickle festivals and county fairs as though they were flowers and Facebook was an altar. 

It was a place where the Facebook friends who truly knew me tracked our progress and supported the effort, and where those whose newsfeed I clogged, viewed the work, neither knowing nor caring that there was any work in it.

It was the place I showed off my new sofa with framed Rothko prints hung perfectly level right above - and where at least five nail holes hid behind each print even though I measured. It was a place where few knew it took five years to save the money for that sofa because I was terrified of credit card debt. It was somewhere just a handful of people were aware that the sofa's predecessor had belonged to my aunt, was chewed up by our dog, and that the prints came from a thrift shop and cost $12 each.

I, who loved to write and aspired to be a blogger, developed my "voice" on Facebook, found rhythms for my words, and learned how good it felt when my posts made people laugh. It was a place where my friends nurtured the writer sapling until it was strong enough to launch that blog. 

Anyone who didn't know me well might have thought: 'What a great little family; I wonder what happened to the marriage.'

For the record, the marriage was lost in the tsunami.

But I had Facebook where I documented our trips to see my mother and my ex-husband, where friends could see how well he and I worked together for the sake of our children, and everyone could wonder just how much was exactly as it seemed. 

Kay-Baby

I have an older sister named Kay. We don't speak, we never exchange gifts, and we've never borrowed each other's clothes. There are no fading, curling black and white photos of her, age eight, awkwardly cradling a newborn me just home from the hospital.

Image by Teece Aronin

There never was any of that, but for one day there was Kay, a tiny train that barely left the station. And for more than fifty years there has been me, the train that left years later to travel miles beyond her.

Kay was born at full-term but breathed too soon, and with that over-eager breath, ingested amniotic fluid. She was cleaned up by the nurses and placed in a bassinette where whatever could be done for her back then was done. On the other side of the nursery window my father stood, murmuring over and over, "The more I see her, the more I want her."

From that day on, when my father spoke of Kay, he called her "Kay-Baby."

When Kay died, my father got back to his job, and my mother returned to the full-time care of their toddler son. That's how the Greatest Generation grieved, by blowing their noses, wiping their tears, and getting back to the tasks at hand. Not long after that, my parents had another child, a boy who thrived. They considered their family complete and once again, got on with things.

Almost seven years later, I was born, an oops baby if ever there had been. My mother was 32 when her doctor broke the news, my father, 47.

My mother wasn't thrilled to learn of her pregnancy. In those days, even at her age, she was considered a bit old to be pregnant, and her boys had long since stopped draining her with the demands of babies. Then, my aunt said something that turned my mother around: "Maybe this one will be a girl."

My father was delighted from the get-go.

Like my brothers and unlike my sister, I was born without complications, and I knew from early on that a baby girl had come before me but died. I stood on a kitchen chair one day, helping my mother bake cookies. I asked her if I was Kay. To me it made perfect sense that if a little girl was born and died, the sister born after would be the kind of do-over that God would permit Himself under special circumstances. 

My mother's reaction to my question, along with her response, are lost to me now. 

I pictured Kay's soul as a beautiful piece of cloth blowing in the breeze and hovering over the world. With my birth, it floated back down, became my soul and helped me become me, Kay-Baby restored.

The idea that I might be Kay, that the universe can recycle a soul taken out of circulation too soon, still appeals to me somehow.

Today Kay-Baby's remains lie in a cemetery next to my parents'. But maybe, just maybe, the bigger part of her is sitting here writing these words.