A Borrowed Life

Late Life Learning

A Borrowed Life

If I was more spiritual, or perhaps a bona fide mystic, I might say that I don’t belong here…Here, meaning in this life, in this existence.

I’m neither, but I still sometimes harbor that sense.

My mother was on Fire Island, a barrier island 8 miles off the Long Island coast, when the hurricane of 1938 hit.

She was 7 months pregnant.

They didn’t have satellite forecasting then, and there hadn’t been a hurricane in the memory of anyone on the island.

So, as the torrential rain and wind came, they assumed it was a nor’easter until an oceanfront house was blown off its foundation and carried into the ocean.

Most of the summer people – that’s all there was then – had left on Labor Day. The perhaps thirty remaining people retreated to the house on the highest ground, which was only ten feet above sea level.

When the storm abated, they went out to survey the damage, only to have the storm renew with even greater force. They hadn’t known the calm was the eye of the storm passing directly over them.

Several more house were destroyed or lost before the storm gave way for good. My grandmother told of standing on the porch, watching the water rise around her house across the walk.

All of them survived, and our family house remained relatively intact.

My mother contracted pneumonia in the storm. After they were all evacuated, she was taken to Roosevelt Hospital in NYC, where her father practiced medicine.

Her severe cough ruptured her membrane, and she gave premature birth to a boy.

He was fully formed, but had immature lungs, and lacking today’s resources, he died soon after being born.

His name was Garrett.

Within a very short while, my mother conceived again.

That was me.

In some literal, mysterious way, Garrett gave his life for me.

I have never been able to connect very strongly with the notion that Jesus gave his life for me.

But I have a keen sense of Garrett’s death opening the way for me.

If Garrett had lived, which he surely would today, I would not be here.

How many years later, 30? my sister had a baby boy. She named him Garrett.

A few years ago, after my sister, his mother, had been dead for a couple of years, I had a conversation with Garrett about how powerful his existence was for me. How connected to him I feel.

He listened in silence as I recounted the birth of his stillborn uncle.

“Mom never told me that story,” he said.

I was dumfounded, though, as I considered it, and what I know of my sister, I might not have been.

She lived most of her adult life trying to break free of the constraints she felt from being born in an upper middle-class family who were clueless about what really counts in this life.

It explains both why she never told Garrett the story, and about the ways in which she still wanted to be able to claim her place without selling out.

She was what we knew then as a hippie. She left the Episcopal Church (she said Episcopalians talk too much) and, after years of considering whether she had the right stuff, she joined the Quaker Meeting in Cambridge.

When I went to the service for her, I was overcome by the stories about the ways she intervened in people’s lives, with money, with energy, with love, that some said rescued them from disaster.

Until shortly before her death, I had mostly dismissed her as being ungrounded. Maybe it was her impending death that finally broke through my conventional, stiff-necked refusal to recognize her as a selfless caretaker of all sorts and conditions of people.

When I went to see her, sat on her bed, and we talked, I apologized to her for having treated her badly.

“I’ve always known what a good heart you have,” she said. “And I understood all too well, how hard it is to break free of the bullshit our family held onto for dear life.”

“I love you, Sylvia,” I said.

“I never doubted that,” she said.

As for Garrett, the incarnation of my life-giver, he has the same generous heart as his mother.

It has taken me a scandalously long time to embrace the wonder of all this.

If you asked me, I might say I don’t “believe” in reincarnation. I’m not sure I “believe” in anything.

I have experienced a surge of holy energy as I write this. Whenever I consider the late Garrett, and when I consider the living Garrett, my nephew (and maybe my godson? Or is he my godfather?), my life seems richer, mysterious.

As for my sister, well she’s turned out to be the Gandhi in my life.

Gandhi renounced his former life on behalf of his calling. So did Sylvia.

When Gandhi was shot, with his final breath, he said, “Oh.” As if, “So this is what happens now.”

Sylvia had that same sense about her, shortly before she died.

“So this is what happens now.”

I’m still working to embrace her acceptance of what life, and death, bring.