Lacunae

For the past ten days, my two grown children and I have been sorting through my parents' house to get it ready to sell. We have been gathering ourselves for this task ever since my mother's death on June 1st, exactly three months ago. (My father died in 2012). We thought we were prepared but of course we were not: the drawers and closets were full of unexpected things, in unexpected quantities, grouped in ways that we could not fathom. Chaos is a form of transformation, often self-organizing, though better understood in retrospect than in the moment.

My mother's decline and departure occurred about three months into the Covid-19 pandemic, and the initial wave of Black Lives Matter demonstrations. We found the timing curious and couldn't help but wonder if and how her final unraveling might be connected to the larger story of our times. My mother's undoing eerily echoes society's chaos, exacerbating what we and the Earth are living through now. There are connections to be made that might help us - connections that are iconic of both my mother and the global patterns of disordered thinking that we, too, are trapped in, and that will inevitably lead to death if we do not course-correct.

My mother's dresser drawers contained a baffling mix of things she seemed to have felt she needed close at hand: Mounds of shoelaces. Paper clips. Firecrackers. A shotgun shell. Unopened gifts. Beaded clutches. Fine Italian leather gloves, never worn, too small to even try on. Nested paper shopping bags from Bullock's department store, which closed more than thirty years ago. On a high shelf, behind unread books with brittle pages, were cassette tapes of my grandfather's second bar mitzvah (1976), and his violin bow, tightly wound in layers of kitchen plastic wrap.

There were folders bulging with receipts dating from 1953 - the year my parents bought the house - and sporadic clusters of receipts through the following decades up until 2009, with no discernable criteria for which ones she kept. Several files contained emails printed out and redlined with spelling and grammar corrections. What was the mind, we wondered, that inhabited the world between receipts and appearances? The microcosmic toggling between order and chaos, accountability and evasion, inclusion and exclusion, feels eerily resonant with this moment of public reckoning.

About ten years ago, I accompanied my mother to an optometrist, where she complained that she was seeing red and beige dots sliding down the walls. He could not help her. She refused to consult a neurologist. After that, she began to lose words. In the months before she died, her speech devolved into gibberish, then silence. Now, when I read the headlines, I see something similar occurring in our public and political discourse.

 During the slow years of attrition, my mother did her best to create tangible order, filling two suitcases with letters and photos from decades prior that she mixed with recent ones in her own mysterious logic. After that, she removed the caps from her many lipsticks and carefully arranged them in straight lines on her desk, where they melted in the afternoon sun. One of our strangest discoveries was a box of missing steak knives wedged between blank stationery and old address books. That particular juxtaposition haunts me with its eloquence.

Scattered throughout the house were several satchels filled with old cameras, at least twenty of them; a crawl space filled with defunct projectors, magnifying glasses, manual adding machines, protractors, slide rules and compasses - tools for using light to record and view what we see, to calculate how much we've got and where we're going. Eight years after his death, my father's flight logs were still neatly stacked in his office, along with pocket charts for dead reckoning he somehow used for navigation while flying solo. I looked up what, exactly, dead reckoning means: it's based on the way foraging animals like ants, rodents and geese find food and return to their nests. Home is the fixed point from which they map their journeys. According to Wikipedia, "for precise positional information, both speed and direction must be accurately known at all times during travel. Most notably, dead reckoning does not account for directional drift during travel through a fluid medium. These errors tend to compound themselves over greater distances, making dead reckoning a difficult method of navigation for longer journeys" due to "cumulative errors of approximation."  Cumulative errors? Directional drift? I rest my case.

Mostly, the closets, shelves and drawers were stuffed with photographs, including several boxes of photos I had never seen, many of them more than one hundred years old and mysteriously torn from family albums. Then there were the thousands upon thousands of slides, some in carousels, others haphazardly tossed into shoe boxes and small plastic bags. Also, a jumble of unlabeled reels of Super-8 home movies. It will take months of sorting to see what stories we can decipher. The keys to the questions that have shaped my life and all our lives are hidden away in unseen images from the past.

As my kids and I worked, the days melted together, and a pattern of absences began to emerge, as if fistfuls of pages had been torn from my mother's life. We found ourselves suddenly curious to see if the contours and timing of the gaps might tell a story of their own, as well as functioning like the negative space in a painting, the shapes creating a narrative made visible by what is omitted or obscured.  

Pulling at that thread, last night I began a list of absences that reveal a resonance between my mother's personal torment and the larger context of her undoing: The first is an absence of reverence for the Natural World. Public evidence of this is so ubiquitous as to be almost cliché. In my mother's private world, though she held a master's degree in geography, she abhorred Nature's chaotic profusion. Increasingly, she experienced its exuberance as a personal affront: in 2007, she paved the entire backyard except for the swimming pool. Another gap is the absence of recognition of ourselves in others, and the inevitable result: a stubborn refusal to embrace our common predicaments. Though we have relinquished our agency to experts, we refuse to heed their advice. Somewhere in that gap is the uncoupling of the public from the personal, rendering us strangely lethargic in the face of overwhelming loss. What has happened to us that we refuse to recognize the moment we are in for what it is and muster our humanity with full reverence? In the words of Barry López, to "step into the treacherous void between oneself and the confounding world, and there to be staggered by the breadth, the intricacy, the possibilities of that world..."

In our ongoing conversation about the missing pieces from the puzzle of my mother, my daughter spoke of how she loves the word lacuna; it has kept her company during the perplexing weeks of the pandemic, of her grandmother's death and our recent marathon of sorting. She pointed to a small metal sculpture of a cat perched in my living room. It comes from Burkina Faso, from a gallery in Ouagadougou. I mention its provenance not only because it still amazes me that I went there, but because it's a place where the veil is thin, and artists have a unique eye for beauty that is as spare as the desert they inhabit. The cat in my living room is made from a piece of rebar that seems to have been melted and shaped by human hands while still pliable: you can see fingerprints in the metal as if it had been squeezed from clay. It's so minimal, it barely exists - it is the merest gesture still recognizable as feline. My daughter says it's the lacunae that make this possible.

In anatomy and biology, a lacuna is the empty space within and between cells, as in plants or bone - the emptiness that gives a living structure strength and stability. In its modern usage, it means absence or gap, as in our collective lacunae, that are becoming a treacherous undertow. But lacuna can also mean hiatus. And the root of lacuna is lacus, the Latin word for lake. In its original form, it also meant pit, cleft or pool and, later, it gave us lagoon. I imagine jumping into cool water, which, undisturbed, reflects the landscape around it, and our own faces if we will get on our knees, crawl to the edge, and peer in.