For those good women who have blessed–and continue to bless–my life

Years ago I read and was profoundly moved by Lisa See’s novel, Snowflower and the Secret Fan. See provided me with a unique look into the 19th century Chinese life of her female protagonist, Lily.  For her entire life, Lily longed for love, something she admits was not right for her but which she could not help but yearn for, wait for, hope for. Ultimately, she realizes that this unjustified desire has been at the root of every problem I have experienced in my life.

It was See’s crafting of Lily and the life she bore that introduced me to the concept of laotong. In some Chinese provinces when girls as young as seven began the footbinding process, they were matched with others who were beginning the same excruciating process. This contracted relationship which grew and developed over a lifetime was called laotong or old same. What these women often lacked in love and security in their marriages, they found in each other’s friendship. Old sames communicated in a secret language that only women could read: nu shu.

Lily and her old same, Snowflower, find in each other a lasting and deep love that they could not find in their arranged marriages or even in their families:

a laotong relationship is made by choice…when we first looked in each other’s eyes in the palanquin I felt something special pass between us–like a spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. But a single spark is not enough to warm a room nor is a single seed enough to grow a fruitful crop. Deep love–true-heart love–must grow. 

Throughout my life, I have been blessed with the friendship of a few good women. At the end of the work day, I have taken solace in those precious moments when I could unburden myself in the presence of an old same. Here, before I faced an evening of making supper, giving baths, folding laundry and grading essays, I could speak my joys, my fears and regrets of all that I’d done or not done that day to a trusted friend. Here, I could speak my doubts in the safety of one who truly understood. Was I a good mother and wife? A good teacher? A good person and friend? What was I really contributing to this world? Who might I become? And what if I didn’t? 

In the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women, you can put everything on the table. Every course is served with transparency, and there is no judgment for dessert. For me, the banquet of laotong has been, and continues to be, one of life’s greatest blessings. As I have moved to new places and new jobs, a new Snowflower would emerge, a new spark to start a fire or a seed to grow rice. And over time, true-heart love would grow and flourish.

Holocaust survivor and author Eli Wiesel writes: Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. Never anything but sharing. . . For me–and I suspect for many women–sharing, however, is everything. In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison’s protagonist, Sethe, explains the genuine power of sharing much better than I can:

She is a friend of my mind. She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order.

In the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women, those who can gather your ragged pieces together and give them back to you in all the right order are those who have made sharing their life’s mission. They are those whose very presence is more than enough. When words fail, when there is no way to “fix” things, when circumstances spiral heedlessly beyond your control, old sames settle in beside you for however long it takes to find what poet Robert Frost calls a momentary stay against confusion. Acquaintances, well-meaning as they may be, offer glib words of advice and quick pats on the back. They smile and utter the dreadful words, Just let me know if you need anything. As if you know what you need. That’s the whole point of laotong: you feel another even when there are no right words. Even when there are simply no words at all.

Laotong may grow in female friendship, in the relationship between mother and daughter, between sisters or cousins, between colleagues. In the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women, there are no rules about who can or cannot be an old same. You can make your own rules, choose your own sisterhood. In Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, Rebecca Wells writes:

She longed for porch friendship, for the sticky, hot sensation of familiar female legs thrown over hers in companionship. She pined for the girliness of it all, the unplanned, improvisational laziness. She wanted to soak the words ‘time management’ out of her lexicon. She wanted to hand over, to yield, to let herself float down the unchartered beautiful fertile musky swamp of life, where creativity and eroticism and deep intelligence dwell.

Porch friendship with familiar female legs thrown over yours. This is it exactly. And if you can’t have a porch, a grocery aisle, a corner of an office or classroom, or the front seat of a car will do. Laotong transcends place and time. If you seek it, she will come.

Perhaps the best thing about the Sanctuary of a Few Good Women is God’s hand in laotong. We may believe that we choose our old sames and that this true-heart love is the product of our own efforts. C. S. Lewis sets us straight:

In friendship…we think we have chosen our peers. In reality a few years’ difference in the dates of our births, a few more miles between certain houses, the choice of one university instead of another…the accident of a topic being raised or not raised at a first meeting–any of these chances might have kept us apart. But, for a Christian, there are, strictly speaking no chances. A secret master of ceremonies has been at work. Christ, who said to the disciples, “Ye have not chosen me, but I have chosen you,” can truly say to every group of Christian friends, “Ye have not chosen one another but I have chosen you for one another.” The friendship is not a reward for our discriminating and good taste in finding one another out. It is the instrument by which God reveals to each of us the beauties of others.  [The Four Loves]

Laotong is, indeed, an instrument of God’s great grace through which He reveals to each of us the beauties of others. And it is likewise an instrument through which God allows others to reveal to us and to affirm in us our own beauties. In a world in which ugliness and uncertainties dominate the airwaves and pervade our lives, old sames doctor the gray oppressiveness of it all with beauty and light.  They communicate in the secret language of a bond forged like steel and tested by fire.

And when they sidle up beside us and we are assured of their tangible presence, this is more than enough to sustain us through whatever may come.

Glassable, she said with a definite flip of her six-year old blonde curls. It’s just glassable. Seated on the floor with a bevy of kindergartners and first graders in a creative writing workshop, I had asked them about the things they treasured most. Rose–I’ll call her Rose–had just identified a glass figurine of a collie dog that stood atop her dresser. She named its colors, the way one leg curled up underneath it, and then she frowned. It’s the frown of one who is trying desperately–on the spot–to retrieve the right word. Just the right word to name just the right thing.

I had learned to bite my tongue, not to interject with possibilities like fragile or delicate. And sure enough, within seconds her brow softened, her eyes sharpened, and she burst forth with glassable! Her fellow writers looked on with assurance. Clearly, it was the just right word for all.

Twenty some years later, I cannot pass a glass vase or candlestick or figurine without inwardly proclaiming It’s just glassable. That’s what it is–glassable. 

Don’t get me wrong. I love the written word, dearly. But there is something akin to an out-of-body experience for me when certain words are spoken.

The beauty and magic of some words are unparalleled. Take limerence, for example. Not to be confused with limerick, the bawdy rhymes of sailors and barflies, a word that clicks off your tongue in witty preface to the humor that follows, limerance is the state of being infatuated with another. The definition is magical enough, but the sound of it, the other-worldly sound of it! You cannot say it quickly or without purpose. You do not let it slip out or say it under your breath. It is a show-caser, a show-stopper, a show-stealer of a word. In the Sanctuary of a Single Spoken Word, limerance is simply magnificent.

Or what about sonder? The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid, as complex as your own. Now this is a word you can hang your hat on. If the spoken wander draws one into the nether world of leisurely adventure, sonder is all this and more. Imagine traveling the world of another’s life, the subterranean life behind the passing smiles and hellos, the life beneath three-piece suits or overalls or aprons. Just imagine. And then say it aloud. Give it its sibilant s and its schwa-like o. Let the final syllable linger, its r filling the air with a resonant timbre. In the Sanctuary of a Single Spoken Word, this is a word meant to be the centerpiece of conversation.

Heliotrope is as stunning spoken as it is arrayed amidst other summer blooms. I remember when I first heard the word spoken. A sixth grade friend read a passage from a book she had checked out from the library, and when she came to the word heliotrope and spoke it perfectly into the bedroom where we had hidden away for the afternoon, it took on a life of its own. Gone were the gingham curtains and posters torn from pages of Tiger Beat. Gone were our cut-off shorts and plastic headbands. Heliotrope transported us into the corner of a Victorian garden where we shared the shade of an organza parasol and secrets unfit for a governess’s ears. Heliotrope carried the full weight of  adolescent romance for us, and merely saying it aloud sent us into communal bliss.

I’ll give it to the French for some singularly spectacular spoken words. Denouement, bouquet, silhouette, chignon, melange, milieu, panache and soiree.  Tres bon, indeed.

The strange wistfulness of used bookstores: vellichor. In the Sanctuary of a Single Spoken Word, there is a special place for such beautiful oddities. They are rarely spoken, not the stuff of casual conversation. And yet spoken, they are the stuff of dictionary-diving, of mulling and re-mulling, and finally, of affirming the absolute perfect marriage of sound and sense.

But just as there is a special place for beautiful oddities, there is also a place for those ordinary words that, when spoken by just the right voice, are extraordinary. In a crowded, pre-Christmas Target, I had misplaced my four-year-old daughter. Actually, she had intentionally placed herself in the middle of a rack of sweaters, completely hidden in what she later claimed was a “fort.” She remained hidden there as her sisters and I frantically searched and were just about to contact the manager when Mom pierced the air. It wasn’t just any Mom, for as any mother knows, moms punctuate the air in any public place. It was my Mom, the spoken word reserved just for me, the most beautiful ordinary spoken word ever. In the Sanctuary of a Single Spoken Word, Mom, Dad, Grandma, Grandpa, as well as your own name and the names of those you love, sit gloriously on the throne.

So let’s hear it for aquiver, aurora, ethereal, gossamer, lithe, winsome, and love. Speak them with reverence. Let them move with effervescence, shine with incandescence, and fill your soul and your world with grace. 

Hiraeth is a Welch word without a direct English translation. Roughly translated it means a homesickness for a home you cannot return to or a home that never was.

I dream of places. I dream in places. People and plots are secondary characters to places that linger with me for days. Often, I return to dream places and find comfort in the crooks and crannies, the hills and dales of places I have visited before. While others travel to cities peopled with theaters, restaurants, and bustling sidewalks, I can only think of the places I would travel to, places with craggy mountainsides, meadows of lavender that stretches as far as the eye can see, deep woods with abandoned cottages, and cold streams that polish rocks and babble deliciously.

I suffer from hiraeth. I have never lived in the places I dream of; nor can I return to them except in dream. Still, they haunt me, delight me, sustain me in ways that people often cannot.

Perhaps I have inherited this hiraeth from my father. At the heart of his poetry is a sense of place. The plains, the rivers, the wind and skies are Nebraska–and yet more. Something beyond the literal landscapes of the state or any state, something that never quite was but could be, and perhaps should be. In “After Haying,” my father writes:

After Haying

There were evenings when

the land drew the sky across its pelvis

blue coming softly down

marrying the brown

filling the windbreaks

with the shadows of long songs

Blue coming softly down/marrying the brown/filling the windbreaks/with shadows of long songs. In these lines is the home I cannot return to, the home that perhaps never was. Some may argue that blue skies and brown earth are the common stuff from which most places are made. They will say that you can go home to these places, for they are all around you. But this blue and this brown are uncommonly my father’s. And mine. These long songs are those I hear most clearly as the songs of home. Perhaps others will not understand the hireath here. How it teases those who will see it with the promise of both tangibility and mysticism. How it lives more fully in dreams and poetry.

In Horton Foote’s play, The Trip to Bountiful, he presents an elderly woman who lives in The Sanctuary of Hiraeth. Carrie Watts is confined to a two-bedroom apartment in Houston which she shares with her son and daughter-in-law. Unable to support herself and live independently in her family home in Bountiful, Texas, she fixes breakfast for her son, vacuums and dusts, and–when she cannot sleep most nights–sits in a rocking chair by the window, the night sky and moon the only tangible reminders of the home she yearns for and dreams of seeing once again. She has attempted, and failed, to escape by bus to Bountiful. Each time, her son, Ludie, finds and retrieves her, warning that she must consider her “bad heart” and stay put.

Finally, in a stroke of the best fortune, she makes it to the bus station–undiscovered–buys a ticket, boards the bus, and makes it to a town ten miles from Bountiful, which no longer exists. When the sheriff finds her sleeping on a bench in the bus station, he informs her that her son charged him with keeping her until he can come and take her home. She cries, she cajoles, she begs until the sheriff consents to driving her the ten miles to see her family home in Bountiful.

Her home is but a shell now, but Mrs. Watts sits on the porch and takes in everything that she has only dreamt of in the Houston apartment. When her son finally arrives, she admits that Bountiful and the family home are no longer how he would have remembered them. But she continues:

But the river will be here. The fields. The woods. The smell of the Gulf. That’s what I took my strength from, Ludie. Not from houses, not from people.

In 1985, Foote’s play was made into a feature film starring Geraldine Page as Carrie Watts. As I have watched and re-watched this film, I live vicariously through Page’s performance. Even today, I can hear her voice giving hiraeth a theatrical substance and permanent presence in my all-time favorite characters. Ultimately, Carrie Watts is returned to the two-bedroom apartment where she will live out her remaining days. As she gets into her son’s car, she turns–one last time–to whisper, Goodbye, Bountiful, goodbye.

She knows the homesickness for the home she cannot return to and understands that, in many ways, this was a home that never really was. At least, it never was the home she believed it to be. The two-story home with upstairs bedroom where she and her son stayed, with the fireplace that her father tended, with the garden where she planted and harvested the stuff that sustained all of them. This home has been ravaged by the Gulf winds and salt. It will not last more than a year or two before it will succumb to the elements. Still, she understands that there is something more, something tangible and mystical like the shadows of long songs in the fields, the woods, the smell of the Gulf. 

In her book, The White Album, Joan Didion writes:

A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his own image.

Like Didion, like Carrie Watts, like my father, I claim the places in my dreams the hardest, I remember them most obsessively. In the Sanctuary of Hiraeth, homesickness is shared among those who love places so radically that we remake them in our own image. When place and self are inextricably bound, this is hiraeth.

Will I always dream of places that I love so radically? I suspect that I will. The yearning for these places is a bittersweet homesickness that both pains and delights. I will not wish it away, for its presence sustains me far more than its absence ever could.

You speak like a green girl / unsifted in such perilous circumstances.                                                                                                                                                                             [Hamlet, William Shakespeare]

Naiveté or naivety: lack of experience, wisdom, or judgment. These are the attributes of a green girl moving unsifted through the circumstances of her world. This is me–or rather this has been me for most of my life. Now, however, let the sifting begin.

I am the mother of a black son, the sister of a black brother, the teacher, colleague, and friend to countless blacks.  I am green. And white.

Standing in the kitchen of my family home, my mother and I were talking when my brother, age 5, entered. Flushed and sputttering, he asked, What does it mean when someone calls you nigger? I am sure that I must have gasped, but my mother simply turned to her son. She never missed a proverbial beat as she pulled him to a stool, sat him down, and offered up the truest definition a child could fathom. As a college student, I marveled at her composure and compassion, for I was seething with anger at the boys next door. I was certain that they would inevitably grow up to be white supremacists or grand wizards in the KKK or drunken men who drove around with Confederate flag decals on their 4-wheel drive trucks. I wanted to school them in all that was good and right and true. I wanted them to feel the degradation and shame that was exclusively black. I wanted them to pay.

As if I knew or had felt the degradation and shame that was exclusively black. How could a white girl growing up in the middle of Nebraska, green and inexperienced in most ways of the world, ever know this? Was my black brother my ticket to understanding? How about my black basketball player friend/Friday night dance partner? Did my relationships with both give me a leg-up on my white friends and neighbors? What, in fact, were my credentials in the world of race relations?

In How It Feels To Be Colored Me, Zora Neale Hurston writes He has only heard what I felt. Exactly. I had only heard about what others felt. Still, I was much like the young white narrator in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees. Living in a household of colored women, she felt as though she were living among hidden royalty:

Up until then I’d thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I’d lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn’t understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.

In the presence of my brother and my college friend, I often felt as though I was simply ordinary, while they were splendidly royal and special. And the boys next door? They were shitbuckets. Genuine Eddie Hazelwust shitbuckets. I felt something, though it was not–and could not be–uniquely black.

Through my blue eyes, I did try to see the world as my brother did, to understand what he must have felt when a middle-aged store clerk refused to wait on us in our hometown J. C. Penney’s store. But I was white college girl with a story yet to be told, a veritable novel of promises at my fingertips. How much my life, my very being differed from Toni Morrison’s protagonist in The Bluest Eye:

Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty….A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.

As a black woman, Morrison understood the weightlessness of universalism, how it thins the substance of racial differences and how, like water, it ultimately holds no form. In response to critics who chided her for writing about and for black people, she wrote:

I never asked Tolstoy to write for me, a little colored girl in Lorain, Ohio. I never asked [James] Joyce not to mention Catholicism or the world of Dublin. Never. And I don’t know why I should be asked to explain your life to you. We have splendid writers to do that, but I am not one of them. It is that business of being universal, a word hopelessly stripped of meaning for me. Faulkner wrote what I suppose could be called regional literature and had it published all over the world. That’s what I wish to do. If I tried to write a universal novel, it would be water. Behind this question is the suggestion that to write for black people is somehow to diminish the writing. From my perspective there are only black people. When I say ‘people,’ that’s what I mean.

When Morrison says people, she means her people. Black people. Although I have read Morrison’s novels and have found themes and characters that offered me insight into myself and my world, I am painfully aware that she was not writing for me. I might write an essay about the universal themes in Beloved or Sula, but truthfully, such an essay would be more academic exercise than truth.

I don’t see color. I just see people. How many times have I heard people brandish these words as weapons against racism? Too many. I may not have said these words, but I fear that I have thought them–or at least, agreed with them. As my son has grown into a man, however, I have had to try these words with the honesty that has come from his experiences and his insights. In this court of experience, these are words that any black prosecutor worth his or her salt could decimate.

Recently, I heard my son on the phone with one of his college professors. He was calling–again–to ask about his grade from a summer course. His current “D”, the professor had explained months ago, was simply a placeholder until he turned in his final paper. Quinn had turned in his final paper the morning after the midnight deadline last summer. He knew the paper was late and had emailed the professor with his apology. The professor responded and asked him to visit him in his office, to admit blame in person before he would grade his paper. Quinn complied, appearing in his office to admit fault and to respectfully ask if his paper might be graded. When he left, he believed that finally he would see his paper graded, and the placeholder “D” replaced with his legitimate grade. Weeks later, nothing, no change in his grade. He followed up by emailing again and asking, once more, if the professor might grade his paper as he had agreed to do in October. Nothing. When his university advisor told him that the professor asked that he appear in person again, Quinn decided to put the entire ordeal behind him and cut his losses.

A week before he was to graduate, however, he asked me if it was worth another try, since by now an entire semester had gone by. When I encouraged him to try one final time, he made the phone call from our kitchen. I listened as he talked to his professor. My heart swelled with pride as I listened to his respectful tone, his well-considered words, his honest admission–a third time–of his fault in missing the deadline.

But something in me soured the more he talked. From their conversation, I could tell that his professor was searching through past emails for proof that Quinn had, indeed, made contact with him. I heard Quinn recall details of their meeting in his office in a desperate attempt to remind him that he had appeared in person, as requested. Finally, I could deduce that the professor found Quinn’s former emails, which jogged his memory of their office meeting, and the phone conversation ended with his promise to grade his paper and change his final grade.

When Quinn hung up the phone, he shook his head. He wanted me to jump through hoops, to prove that I cared, that I wasn’t just another black athlete on a free ride. He didn’t come right out and say it, but that’s the bottom line. How could he not remember that I stood before him in his office, admitting my fault? How could he not even remember me? I wanted to say because he’s a shitbucket–that’s why, but I didn’t. I took the party line: There are always going to be people–of all colors and persuasions–who refuse to see others. You did the right thing by being respectful and honest. 

Two days later, he made good on his promise, and Quinn received a B for the course. Victory? Maybe.

In truth, I knew that I had witnessed my son kowtow to a white man who was jerking him around. To each yes sir, I could imagine his white prof swiveling in his office chair, confident in his power to grant favors. Or not. Would he have made my son beg for his paper to be graded if he were white? Honestly, I don’t know. If I had to make an educated guess based on Quinn’s experience, though, I would say no. There’s a good chance that a white son’s email would have received a timelier response. A white son would probably not have been asked to accept blame in person, not once but twice. And a white son would likely have been remembered.

For Quinn’s entire life, we have hoped that he would be judged for his character and his acts. My husband and I have coached him to be respectful, polite, honest, compassionate, hard-working, faithful, and persistent. We expected him to see through others’ eyes and perspectives before he judges, before he speaks and acts. Like most parents, we simply wanted him to grow into a man of virtue.

But if I were to be brutally honest, I would have to admit that we also told him that he would have to be the bigger man on the athletic field, in the classroom and workplace, and in general. I would have to admit that I cautioned him about driving a nice car with window tint, warning that he may be targeted as a young black man (and he was–three times by the same officer). And I would have to confess that, as a college student, I worried that, to some, he would be just another black athlete majoring in football and to others, a dark-skinned man with a white soul, a white family, and no legitimate place among his black peers.

As a baby, Quinn solicited many head-pats, coos, comments and questions. What a head of hair he has! How good of you to do this [adopt a black child]. Are you babysitting? A foster parent? What does his father look like? Quinn and I took it in stride. He allowed perfect strangers to pat his afroed head, to literally get in his face in an attempt to make him smile, and to touch him. I accepted questions and comments that could have been offensive but ones that I shrugged off as well-intentioned but ignorant. I embraced my role as ambassador of something wholly unique in rural Iowa: a white mother who had chosen to adopt a black son.

On several occasions, people would ask where Quinn came from. When I identified our adoption agency, they persisted with but where did he come from? I would smile and answer, Georgia. Columbus, Georgia. It took several occasions like this for me to realize that when these people didn’t respond, their silence was disappointment–at best–and disapproval–at worst. In my arms, they hoped to see a poor black orphan from Zimbabwe or the Sudan. They wanted to affirm the missionary work that my family had undertaken. In their eyes, a black child from Africa was simply acceptable in a way that an American black child was not.

In my greeness, however, I chalked such interactions off to their loss. What they could not or would not understand was just too bad. Because I had been unsifted in such perilous circumstances, I excused others for their ignorance and excused myself for my restraint. I could have given them a piece of my mind, but I didn’t. Certainly, this was the more civil position. After all, I was not going to change the minds and hearts of such ignorance. Was I?

I just finished listening to Jodi Picoult’s novel, Small Great Things. As I drove, I listened to others narrate her book, their voices bringing her characters to life for me in unexpected ways. This is the story of veteran black labor and delivery nurse, Ruth, who is raising her son on her own after her husband was killed in Afghanistan. Forbidden by a white supremacist couple to touch their newborn son, she is removed from their case. When the white nurse charged with his care is called away on a medical emergency, she asks Ruth to watch the baby momentarily until she returns. Clearly uncomfortable and fearing for her job, Ruth consents but hopes that no one–especially the baby’s racist parents–will see her. Within moments, however, the baby appears to be lifeless, ashen and still. With the other nurses and doctors attending to the emergency, there is no one to call. And so Ruth jostles the infant, hoping he will breathe again. He doesn’t, and when she hears noise in the hallway, she quickly re-swaddles the baby and steps back from the bassinet.

The head nurse who arrives quickly calls a code, but in spite of everyone’s (including Ruth’s) best efforts, the baby dies. Days later, the parents file a lawsuit against Ruth, who is charged with murder. The narrative is largely Ruth’s as she faces the loss of her job, her friends, and her dignity in the face of a murder trial. Her white public defender, Kennedy, is confident of the fact that she does not see color, that she has defended and understood other blacks, but that the trial must be about creating reasonable doubt as to the baby’s death–not race, never race. As the trial comes to a close, Ruth finally confronts her lawyer and says:

You say you don’t see color…but that’s all you see. You’re so hyperaware of it, and of trying to look like you aren’t prejudiced, you can’t even understand that when you say race doesn’t matter all I hear is you dismissing what I’ve felt, what I’ve lived, what it’s like to be put down because of the color of my skin.

This is a popular novel–not a book you will find on an university syllabus. Still, there were moments in my car that I simply sat there, taking in Ruth’s words and knowing that I did not know. When Kennedy spoke, I cringed. In many scenes, her voice could have been mine, dismissing what blacks have felt and lived under the guise of my colorblind care. When Ruth spoke of the dreams she had for her son, Edison, I saw my son’s life spill out before me. And once, my car idling in the HyVee parking lot as I listened, I actually teared up and wondered if Ruth could be for Quinn what I could not.

Ultimately, Ruth saw that her dark skin–not her character, her education, or the life she had built–would define her:

On one side of the seesaw is my education. My nursing certification. My twenty years of service at the hospital. My neat little home. My spotless RAV4. My National Honor Society-inductee son. All of these building blocks of my existence, and yet the only quality straddling the other side is so hulking and dense that it tips the balance every time: my brown skin.

In my naivety and out of my great love, I tried to tip the balance towards all of those attributes which make Quinn the man he is. But I failed to honestly acknowledge that his blackness may–at times–tip the balance in spite of all he has become. I failed to see how hulking and dense this may be for him. I played the Pollyanna because I desperately wanted the world to be a kinder, better, more equitable place for him, for my brother, and for all those who have had the balance of their lives tipped towards what others believe them to be.

Of one thing I am certain: I am white, and I am green. This doesn’t excuse me from trying to understand, from actively listening, and from feeling–to the extent that I can–what others feel. But it does remind me that I must see color. My refusal to do so is dishonest and adolescent.

Neither, however, will I claim victim status or ask for special treatment for my black son. I will not excuse his sins as inevitable products of white oppression. I will not condone general retaliation or blanket resentment against whites because they are not black and because their great, great grandparents may–or may not–have been slaveholders.

Undoubtedly, I will spend the rest of my life acknowledging what I do not and cannot know about being black, while continuing to hold my son accountable for living a godly life. And I can take solace in the words of Martin Luther King, Jr., who always held out hope for the kind of world I wish for my son and brother, for all of us:

I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word. 

Myrrh (n.) A gum resin, usually of a yellowish brown or amber color, of an aromatic odor, and a bitter, slightly pungent taste. It is valued for its odor and for its medicinal properties. It exudes from the bark of a shrub of Abyssinia and Arabia, the Balsamodendron Myrrha. [Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary]

Myrrh is a word that will not quit. Its liquid syllables ooze like the sap, making their way forward in an endless descent. You cannot say it quickly or forcefully. It is a door that will never snap shut, a sky that rumbles but never matures into cracks or peals. For most, it is a word reserved for magi, biblical scholars, and essential oil peddlers. For some, it is the season that defines their lives.

In 1857, John Henry Hopkins, Jr., a rector at Christ Episcopal Church in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, wrote “We Three Kings of Orient Are” for a Christmas pageant in New York City. His fifth verse–a verse I can never recall actually singing–can hardly be sung with lustful good cheer:

Myrrh is mine: it’s bitter perfume
Breathes a life of gathering gloom.
Sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying,
Sealed in the stone-cold tomb.

According to some sources, myrrh is actually more musky-smelling than bitter. Still, most will agree that its identification as a perfume is an exaggeration. Unless you consider Vicks Vapor Rub, WD-40, or mimeograph solvent as cologne, that is. Named the perfume of the dead, its use as an embalming ointment is noted in John 19:39. Myrrh mixed with wine (Mark 15:23) was also used as a type of anesthetic to dull pain. Associated with pain and death, then, myrrh is not the stuff that naturally spawns joy, peace, and goodwill.

And oh, how Hopkins characterizes myrrh with his string of dreadful present participles: gathering, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, and dying. Now that’s a cheery string of verbs for you! And the pièce de ré·sis·tance, the final blow? A past tense sealed coupled with a stone-cold tomb. 

The season of myrrh is a stone-cold tomb. Those who live there, sealed in gathering gloom, are sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, and dying. Theirs is a one-season existence in which spring never comes, never gives way to summer. In her poem, “The Moon and the Yew Tree,” Sylvia Plath writes as one who is well acquainted with the season of myrrh:

The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.

Plath lived in the Season of Myrrh until she did not. Live, that is. She owns the season as one of complete despair, she identifies it as her home, and she ultimately writes that “the message of the yew tree is blackness–blackness and silence.” In one way or another, Plath was perpetually sorrowing, sighing, bleeding, dying. The slogan of her life could clearly have been myrrh is mine. Although she ultimately took her own life, her greater death occurred daily, moment by moment, when life ravaged and spit her out, tattered and moorless, to breathe again, to live another day. For Plath, her life was, indeed, a dark crime.

In Gustave Flaubert’s novel Madame Bovary,  he presents a woman who is trapped in a banal and provincial life, a life in which she is convinced that nothing was going to happen and in whose future, there was nothing but a dark corridor and at the far end the door was bolted. Through a string of adulterous affairs with men she believed, she hoped beyond hope, would rescue her, she tries to turn winter to spring. Through a wanton pursuit of luxurious things, she tries to force spring into summer. Like Plath, however, she is far too aware of the futile means she had chosen to save herself and finally swallows arsenic. Her death, like her life, is agonizing. Though the trappings of Bovary’s life have glittered with promise, in the end, she realizes the truth of her earlier fears: she has lived solidly in the Season of Myrrh which imprisons its inhabitants in dark corridors with bolted doors.

Edna Pontillier, Kate Chopin’s protagonist in her novel The Awakening, suffers from a similar provincial malaise. With cooks, maids, and nannies to staff her winter and summer homes, she drowns in daily social and familial obligations that leave her passionless and purposeless. Tragically, she awakens to realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her only to finally discover this awakening to be more curse than blessing. In the Season of Myrrh, bitterness comes in a variety of forms. Perhaps the worst is the kind of painful self-awareness that culminates in the desire to simply cease to exist.

At the end of the novel, Chopin offers present participles that appear in sharp contrast to those Hopkins uses in verse five of his carol:

The water of the Gulf stretched out before her, gleaming with the million lights of the sun. The voice of the sea is seductive, never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude. All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight. A bird with a broken wing was beating the air above, reeling, fluttering, circling disabled down, down to the water. [The Awakening, Chapter 39, pg. 151-152]

As Mrs. Pontillier walks into the sea whose voice is never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander in abysses of solitude, however, she walks to her death. The sea’s seduction–like the seduction of gas or poison–is a major theme in the Season of Myrrh. In the abysses of solitude, you will feel no pain. You will unload your bitter burdens. You will cease to exist.

In Danish philosopher, Soren Kierkegaard’s book, The Sickness Unto Death,  he defines his concept of despair. Writing under the pseudonym Anti-Climacus, he begins with a reference to John 11:4 [This sickness in not unto death.] This is the story in which Jesus raises Lazarus from death. Anti-Climacus posits that the Christian concept of death is one that leads to eternal life. He argues accordingly that death is nothing for the Christian to fear. What does he claim should be feared then? The inability to die.

Those who live in the Season of Myrrh know this fear. Intimately, incessantly, intellectually, and spiritually, they know this fear. They fear that the well-intentioned but ultimately cruel platitudes of others will never end: this, too, shall pass; tomorrow will be a new, a better day; time heals all; look on the bright side; see your cup as half-full; take account of the blessings in your life, blah, blah blah. They fear they will drown in positive words and rescue efforts but will not die.

Although some desperate, depressed individuals do take their lives when they cannot find a way forward, most who live in the Season of Myrrh do not. They may wish to cease to exist, but they are often unable to die. Some are bound by ethics of service and/or love for others whom they do not wish to hurt or disappoint. Others are bound by a faith that affirms the worth of even a wretch like me. Still others are simply cowardly, unable to fathom such a deliberate and final act. Whatever the reason, depression’s scent lingers like myrrh, a sickly and bitter reminder that there are things far worse than death.

Every day, I hear or read of the mental health crisis in our country. I have lived this crisis in the workplace, in my family and in my friendships. Though I cannot say that I know depression of this magnitude, I have had seasons in my life when I skirted along its edges and felt the compulsive pull of despair. I am more than grateful that antidepressants have helped me keep this despair at bay. Now, I can actually sleep at night, I no longer hold my breath or tense my muscles uncontrollably, and I can tame my guilt and worry into something I can manage most days. My altered brain chemistry has transformed my life, and I can fully experience spring and summer.

But what of those who have tried it all–antidepressants, counseling, self-help programs, ECT, new relationships, new careers, no relationships, no careers? Theirs is a relentless Season of Myrrh, of gathering, sorrowing, sighing, bleeding. And the type of dying reserved for the living who must find the courage to drag their desperate corpses through another day.

There are far too many who suffer this way, and it goes without saying that we are failing to provide the necessary and compassionate services for them. We pay lip service to their needs and to our concern for them, but in the end, theirs is a messy problem that brings us all down. So we turn to the living and assuage our guilt with occasional donations to organizations must better equipped to handle such issues.

As one individual, one who is neither a trained counselor or doctor, I realize how little I can effectively do for those who walk the Season of Myrrh. It is this helplessness which has plagued me my entire life. What I can do and what others can surely do is to show genuine compassion.

The ecclesiastical Latin definition of compassion is to suffer with. Suffering with others is a messy, painful business. But if it is messy and painful for us, imagine what it is for those confined to the Season of Myrrh. While we ultimately walk into stories with happier endings, they wander dark corridors  of stories that conclude with bolted doors. And on the other side of these doors? There are the fruits of summer that they can only imagine and will never taste.

The Season of Myrrh is real. It knows no social, economic, or racial boundaries. It disregards age and education, reputation and faith. If I could wish or pray it away, I would. If I can offer a glimpse of summer to those in darkness, I will. And if I can suffer with another, I hope to have the courage and stamina to do so.