Devotion Read online

  Before we made a final decision to leave the city, we made an appointment for Jacob to see an expert in early childhood development. Jacob’s speech was still lagging, and he had been the last of his peer group to learn to walk. The medication he had taken—the stuff that saved his life—had a sedative effect. For a year of his infancy, he had essentially been tranquilized. If he was going to need intervention—speech therapy, occupational therapy, who-knew-what—then maybe we should stay in the city, where I imagined such things were more readily available.

  After spending several hours with Jacob doing a comprehensive evaluation, the doctor called us into his office.

  “You realize that most children who survive infantile spasms are eventually diagnosed with pervasive developmental disorder,” he began. And then—after a brief, sadistic pause: “Jacob is fine. He exhibits no signs of autism.”

  We moved into the house on a cold, muddy day in early April. I was about to turn forty. Jacob was about to turn three. Michael—heading toward fifty—had switched careers from foreign correspondent to screenwriter. I had spent the previous two years struggling to write a novel. The future was unclear. We had no money to speak of, nothing resembling financial security. Two writers, post–9/11 refugees, strangers in a strange land. We should have been petrified—we should have questioned our own sanity. But we had learned something about what was worth being petrified about, and what wasn’t.

  25.

  The small white leather-bound prayer book is embossed on the inside cover with my parents’ names, along with the date and place of their marriage. It has been tucked into the back of a file cabinet drawer for years, along with other mementos of a long-gone life: expired passports, my mother’s change purse, my father’s old wallet, the velvet pouch that contains his tallit and tefillin. I’ve rarely opened the file drawer, much less the prayer book itself. I haven’t wanted to dwell on my parents as young, hopeful, at the beginning of their lives together.

  But I’ve set myself on a course that doesn’t allow me to be a coward. And so recently I pulled the prayer book—along with a few other items—out of the drawer. It sat on my desk for a while before I actually looked inside. There are prayers for everything. Morning Prayer for Boys. Morning Prayer for Girls. Grace after Meals, of course. I could practically hear the well-dressed wedding guests at Young Israel of Fifth Avenue singing the Birkat Hamazon as the last of the strawberry shortcake was cleared from the tables. In the middle of the book, following these more typical prayers, there is a list of “Blessings on Various Occasions”:

  Before eating bread.

  Before drinking wine.

  Before partaking of food, other than bread, prepared from any of the five species of grain: wheat, barley, rye, oats, and spelt.

  On partaking of meat, fish, eggs, cheese, etc., or drinking any liquor except wine.

  On eating fruit that grows on trees.

  On eating fruit that grows on the ground, herbage, etc.

  On smelling fragrant woods or barks.

  On putting on a new garment.

  On placing a mezuzah on the doorpost.

  On eating any fruit for the first time in season, on entering into possession of a new house or land, on purchasing new dishes.

  On witnessing lightning, or on seeing falling stars, lofty mountains, or great deserts.

  On hearing thunder or storms.

  On seeing the rainbow.

  At the first sight of an ocean or sea.

  On hearing sad tidings.

  On meeting a friend for the first time since his convalescence from sickness.

  This last one reads: Blessed be the Merciful One, who hath given thee back to us, and not given thee unto dust.

  26.

  The summer after we first moved to Connecticut, we were invited to a barbecue by the lake. Families from Jacob’s school, people we didn’t yet know, gathered around grills, coolers filled with ice, tonic, gin, wine, sodas. As the sun set over the lake, little kids splashed in the shallow water along the beach, and bigger kids played freeze-tag as the grown-ups cooked and drank.

  I saw a boy—he must have been seven or eight—running around with the others. He looked like Samson, his raggedy mane of blond hair reaching all the way down his skinny back to his waist. This was Connecticut, not Berkeley. The boy stood out.

  One of the women saw me notice him, and filled me in. “He was very sick as a baby,” she said. “He very nearly died. His parents became born-again. They made a promise to God that if he saved their son, they would never cut his hair, until he was old enough to cut it himself.”

  I watched the boy whooping it up with his friends. His parents, who had been pointed out to me, were a good-looking couple, blond and rangy. The wife leaned back on a beach chair, balancing a gin and tonic on one tanned knee. It would be years before I exchanged a single word with her, but still—born-again Christian that she was, lapsed Jew that I was—I felt like I knew her. I searched the shoreline for Jacob, my toddler. He was crouched down, examining a rock, his back curved, as if in supplication.

  27.

  When we were still living in Brooklyn I craved comfort food and cooked it every night. My favorite was a recipe for meat lasagna that included a cup and a half of heavy cream. Also high on the list was spaghetti carbonara: bacon, garlic, eggs, and more heavy cream. I wasn’t concerned about calories or fat content. Only with flavor, texture, satisfaction. We opened bottles of good red wine usually reserved for special occasions. Dipped hunks of crusty French bread into leftover sauce. Cleaned our plates. Ate dessert.

  During the days, I had begun to work on an assignment for the New York Times Magazine. Jacob had spent one night when he was ill under observation in the pediatric step-down intensive care unit at Mount Sinai Hospital—the hospital on the Upper East Side where both he and I had been born. The ward was filled with very sick kids, most of whom lived there. Two girls were awaiting heart transplants; the older one had been in the hospital for nearly a year. A seven-year-old boy lived along with his stuffed animals inside an isolation tent with tubes coming out of his stomach. The halls and doors of the step-down unit were decorated with the children’s art projects: watercolors of rainbows, stick-figure drawings of families. Some of the rooms were equipped with video monitors so that the children could communicate with their parents at home.

  While Jacob dozed, I had wandered the halls, talking with some of the kids. During the months that followed, I often found myself thinking about them. Eventually—after Jacob was well again—I called an editor at the Times and got an assignment to write a story. I started spending all my days at the hospital. I wore a special volunteer identification tag—though everyone on the unit knew I was there as a reporter—and made my way in and out of the children’s rooms. I sat in on their tutoring sessions, hovered in their doorways as the doctors made their rounds. The two heart-transplant girls had become close. The eleven-year-old took me aside one day. Her long dark hair streamed in waves down the back of her pink bathrobe. Her eyes were huge and brown.

  “It’s hard to live here in the hospital, but do you know what? I feel really bad for my friend,” she told me. “She’s only nine. She hasn’t had much of a childhood yet.”

  There in the step-down unit was the invisible veil that separates the healthy from the sick. It was impossible to be in that hospital ward full of children and push thoughts of Jacob from my mind. I remembered the way that very same veil had settled over us, like the sheerest netting, just a year and a half earlier. On that long ride home to Brooklyn from the neurologist’s office, I had looked out the car window at the Brooklyn Bridge, a sight that had always made my heart lift. Now, my heart was a stone in my chest. The water below was gray, churning. The cars surrounding us were filled with lucky people going about their daily business. They were thinking about what to pick up for dinner, or an annoying thing a colleague said at work. They had no idea how good they had it. And we—we had crossed over to a place where only one thing matte
red. Seven out of a million. My consciousness, the whole way I saw the world, had been changed in an instant.

  I saw Jacob in the face of every child in the step-down unit. I saw Michael and myself in the stooped shoulders of each parent pacing the halls. We had come so close to devastation. We had been dangled by our feet over an abyss—and then brought back. Our veil had lifted—but I knew the truth, which was that the veil hovers, always. It can descend on anyone, at any time. The trick—if it is a trick—is to know this but not let it stop you.

  The nurses at Mount Sinai Hospital were the most exhausted nurses I had ever seen. Their patients didn’t just come and go, as they would in any other intensive care unit. They came and stayed, these children, with their malformed hearts and kidneys and livers. They stayed and—through the daily act of care, the cleaning and disinfecting and flushing of bedpans and stents and intravenous lines—the nurses came to love them. Those nurses knew the odds: at least half of those children wouldn’t make it. The clock was always ticking. Donor organs wouldn’t arrive in time. A delicate apparatus would falter, then fail. But still—knowing what they knew—they didn’t hold back. They opened themselves up to the probability that their hearts would be broken again and again.

  One morning, a few weeks into the reporting, I commuted from Brooklyn to the Upper East Side, as I had every other morning. I walked uptown on Fifth Avenue and into the Mount Sinai lobby. The guard knew me by now, and waved me through. But I couldn’t get into the elevator, couldn’t press the button for the sixth floor. I sat in a plastic chair and waited to feel stronger. I felt like I might come apart—my skin dissolving, with nothing to protect me. I waited in the lobby for a while—that same lobby that I had walked through as a woman in labor, and walked through again with my healthy infant bundled into a car seat. But the feeling didn’t pass. I turned around and went home.

  I called my editor at the Times and told her that I couldn’t do the story—I just couldn’t do it. These were families who had it so much worse than we ever did, even in our darkest hour. But I had no journalistic distance. Even with my volunteer badge on, striding in from the outside, I wasn’t an outsider. I couldn’t simply come and go. Each time I left the step-down unit and reentered the land of the lucky, my inner voice screamed: Why them and not us? Why such terrible maladies? Why should children suffer? Why have we been spared? Why, why, why?

  Months later, I called one of the nurses in the step-down unit to ask about the heart transplant girls. The eleven-year-old had received a heart, and died during surgery. The nine-year-old, alone in the hospital without her friend, was still waiting.

  And so I continued to cook. I bought heavy cast-iron casseroles in bright, cheery colors: canary yellow, royal blue. Stews bubbled on the stovetop. Braised beef, lamb shanks, chicken with hot spicy sausage. Handmade pasta stuffed with a mixture of cheese and black trumpet mushrooms. Michael and I gained ten pounds between us. I clipped recipes, shopped at farmers markets, tracked down rare ingredients. Small terra-cotta pots of herbs lined my kitchen windowsill like toy soldiers. Music played. The back door flung open to the garden below. Jacob toddled around the kitchen, banging wooden spoons. The wafting scent of sizzling garlic, sauteed onions, lured Michael from his third-floor study. Daddy! Family hug! Jacob had learned to say. Family hug! his high sweet voice called out. Day after day, Michael hoisted Jacob up in his arms, and the three of us held each other in a tight embrace. All the while, far above our Brooklyn brownstone, the veil floated in the sky.

  28.

  After returning home from Kripalu, I promised myself that each day I would practice metta meditation for at least fifteen minutes. Having been on retreat for three days, I didn’t think this was a particularly tall order. Surely I had the discipline to sit still for fifteen minutes. To prepare, I ordered an elaborate meditation cushion, and a timer that was supposed to chime with the sound of Tibetan bells. The meditation cushion with its three-legged plastic base shaped like a flying saucer proved uncomfortable and strange; the timer’s chimes sounded like the electronic ring of a regular alarm clock. So I gave up on props and tried to just sit, using the comforting metta phrases that Sylvia Boorstein had taught.

  May I feel protected and safe; may I feel contented and pleased… My mind would break through the words almost instantly. Gotta call the dentist. When’s the school picnic? These first thoughts were all on the level of the utterly mundane. I tried to be a neutral observer—to simply watch the thoughts as if they were clouds in the sky—but it was difficult. I was full of self-judgment. This was what was in my mind? My first layer of consciousness felt like a trash can full of Post-its and to-do lists.

  May my physical body support me with strength; may my life unfold smoothly with ease. I couldn’t get all the way through these four brief phrases without some bit of detritus from my daily life intruding. Why hasn’t that health insurance reimbursement come in yet? It seemed impossible to quiet down. Again and again, I was overcome by an intense desire to open my eyes, to move, to check the timer—to stop. The desire felt physical—an uncomfortable surge of energy. As soon as one passed, another would start up again.

  On some days I discovered that I was able to tolerate these surges of energy for at least a little while. And when I did, I began to see the endless, circular monologue beneath them. No wonder I didn’t want to go there! Worry, fear, doubt, resentment, envy, anxiety, comparison, sadness—apparently these were the themes of the complicated stories churning through my head. Rather than being like a still, clear pool of water—an image often used in visualizations—my mind was a stagnant pond badly in need of dredging. The checklists and tasks were the debris floating on the surface. Either way, it was murky territory, and I didn’t want to go there.

  But go there I continued to do—because really, what was the alternative? I had gotten a peek at the enemy, and she was me. If worry, fear, doubt, resentment, et al. were part of the fabric of my inner life, didn’t I need to know about it? Each day it took longer and longer to prepare myself to meditate; simply plunking myself down on the floor wasn’t going to do the trick. I started to worry that this was becoming a full-time job. What was an ambitious, sociable, urban-oriented forty-five-year-old woman doing, spending her mornings sitting in dead silence with her eyes closed in a house in the middle of nowhere?

  After Jacob was off to school and Michael had left for his writing studio in town, I unrolled my yoga mat. Most mornings I didn’t feel like doing this, but I had learned that it was best to ignore what I felt like doing, and instead create a ritual, a habit. I put on the decidedly unorthodox yogic mixed tape that Michael had made me: an eclectic combination of everything from Pink to Leonard Cohen. And then I did my intense hour-long physical practice, which had begun to feel, to me, like the only possible preparation for meditation. It seemed that I needed to physically exhaust myself before my mind could find any quiet.

  Once the final strains of k. d. lang singing “Hallelujah” faded away, I was ready—or at least as ready as I could make myself. I folded my legs into half-lotus and began the internal struggle to let go. I repeated Sylvia’s phrases. Focused on the out breath. Focused on the in and the out breath. Became aware of the birds chirping outside my window, the distant rumble of a truck straining uphill. What was this exploration? I was like a scientist experimenting in a laboratory of the self. I watched the thoughts come, tried to label them simply as thinking.

  Why did she do that to me? I never—

  Thinking.

  How are we ever going to be able to afford—

  Thinking.

  I hope he didn’t think that I—

  Thinking.

  The surges of energy continued. By now, I knew that these surges meant that there was more; beneath these painful, but still mostly mundane, concerns lurked something pure and deep that this simple process of sitting was stirring up. I couldn’t touch it yet. All I knew was that sitting helped—and by that, I don’t mean that it helped make me feel better. Let me
be perfectly clear: meditation was not helping me feel better. It was hard, scary, and sometimes felt silly. What was I doing? I had deadlines to meet. Students to teach. Food shopping to do. But it was helping me to make out the vaguest beginning of an outline. I was starting to see what was there.

  29.

  My parents had been driving home on a New Jersey highway during an early-evening blizzard when my father passed out behind the wheel. His foot became dead weight and pressed the gas pedal to the floor. His body slumped forward. My mother screamed and lunged over him, trying to steer as the car made two wide circles across the entire width of the highway. It flew over the median, into three lanes of onrushing traffic and back again. By the time the car crashed into a concrete embankment and came to a stop, my mother had sustained eighty fractures. Her right leg was shattered, she had multiple broken ribs, a broken nose, a lacerated cheekbone. She was bleeding internally. My father was unconscious. It took two and a half weeks for him to die.

  I have often wondered what I was doing at the exact moment of my parents’ accident. I might have been sleeping, or lying in bed reading a magazine. I might have been sipping a cup of tea. How could I not have felt it happening? I was on the other side of the country, in southern California, but still—how does the fabric that connects us rip into shreds without our knowing it? The day of my parents’ accident, I had the only allergic reaction I’ve ever had to anything before or since. Hives covered my face and upper body. I became hot, itchy, swollen—as if some foreign creature had become trapped inside me and was desperately trying to claw its way out. Coincidence? Probably. But it’s hard not to feel that my body knew something that the rest of me didn’t.