Distance

My daughter embarked upon journeys of her own early on, and she placed an ocean between us. The placing of the ocean was not her intent, but rather an indirect outcome of decisions she made, and it has had an ongoing effect on our lives. I had always imagined that she would be near, that our days would lace together somehow, and we would know each other in all the ordinary ways, but instead, real time together necessitates exhausting and extravagant travel, and for the better part of the current year, our only visits have been disjointed glimpses on a screen.

On the other side of that ocean, my grandson has grown from a chubby little toddler to something much more akin to boy, verbal and angular and constantly in motion, and we are missing all of it. I am happy about the life this little family has in England, which seems healthy and joyful to me, but I have to admit that sometimes I feel a bit sorry for myself. So there, I’ve said it.

The great breadth of distance looms before me daily, misting the faraway lives of these loved ones into something vaguely mythological, perhaps rendering them more beautiful and fantastic than they are. I picture my grandson running through the streets of Oxford, “green and carefree, famous among barns” as Dylan Thomas wrote of his own boyhood, playing lordly in the happy yard, chasing rivers of windfall light. And my daughter, once the little girl who lived inside this very house, now a complex and elegant woman that I hardly seem to know, a woman with silver strands in dark hair, giving literary lectures, swimming in rivers by moonlight, always a bit too busy. Our mutual love is understood, supposedly a given, but a given withheld can feel like a weight, and I don’t know what to do with it.

Can love travel like starlight across distance, traversing skies and ocean? The whimsical poet in me thinks so. It forms the words on this digital page, poor substitutes for hugs and walks and meals together, but some kind of energy nonetheless, not nothing. Can I stretch and sculpt my yearning into usefulness, perhaps? Transfer the wanting and the waiting into wonder, noticing and cherishing all that has not left?

There is an unspoken rule about saying these things. I must not provoke guilt or seem ungrateful. I must gracefully accept. And did I not abandon my own family of origin many years ago and make a new kind of life? Did I think about my parents missing me? Actually, I sometimes did, but those were harder times and a different kind of family. Maybe leaving can be prompted as much by the lure of dreams as a need to escape. Maybe a foundation of love and confidence steadies the traveler, inspires imagination, and yields the courage to go even further. For those on the shore, left behind, the trick is to stand back with grace, beaming pride and good wishes across the sea. I’m doing my best.

But Merwin said it with candor:

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its color.

It’s a different kind of loss, thank God, than the departures of my dead. I remember my wise friend Oralee, whose only son and daughter-in-law had died and left no children, writing in a letter to me when she was 98 that I should rejoice in the fact that my daughter and her family were healthy and happy and reachable, and I could let them know I love them and celebrate the fact that they are thriving. Rejoice, she said. A big word, and a humbling truth.

But the absence does pierce me sometimes, and I am stitching everything with its color. The threads shimmer and shift in the different kinds of light, and the memories of our time together are embroidered everywhere. I see Miranda at every age she ever was, riding her beloved Appaloosa in the hills, doing homework at the table, and even recently, curled up with a book in the big red upholstered living room chair. And here is Felix, searching for his lost yellow roller truck in the rain-filled culvert, running naked at the beach, and eagerly helping Papa with jobs. I wrote him a story about a secret door in his house that would open up to California, and it was a wonderful fantasy, but only that.

I try to comprehend distance, the 5,428 miles (according to Google) between Gaviota and Oxford, the hours and the hurdles that must be endured, and it is still a kind of miracle that the possibility of visiting exists. The last time he was here, I gave Felix a compass, and tried to explain navigation and direction, things I barely understand myself, and we sat in the window seat and looked out onto the channel that was twinkling in the sunlight, and Santa Rosa Island beyond, and he is further than that now, but so present in my heart. He is growing and changing without me, every day, but the memory of me is in there somewhere.

I’ve been reading a book by Ruth Ozeki called For the Time Being, and it has got me thinking about dimensions like time and space. “A time being,” she writes, “is someone who lives in time, and that means you, and me, and every one of us who is, or was, or ever will be.”

We time beings exist in different moments and different places, but maybe we are not bound by these. Maybe we can find each other through our words. Maybe we are other than the physical vessels in which we drift, souls undefined by distance. My beautiful daughter is experiencing the tall late summer skies of 7 p.m. in England right now. I can picture the indigo of twilight settling on the rooftops of the old brick houses, a cyclist pedaling by, Xander in the kitchen, Felix building Leg-O marvels on the floor, she looking up from her book, feeling wistful, her mouth a serious straight line, always a worry hovering, and oh, how I wish I could be there and mother her, but she never much allowed that anyway. I’m channeling my love to her instead. It defies all distance.