Güd wrtr

Your heart’s no good as a heart until it’s been broken at least ten times.
—Actor/screenwriter Emma Thompson quoting her grandmother

•••

1. Being born. If that’s not a heartbreaker, what is? Coming into air, for starters, cold air that prompts lungs you didn’t know you had to start—what’s that?—breathing. You’re squeezed through a tight chute only to emerge into a bright, cold world only to get a rude whack on the back or butt, a taste of unfairnesses to come. You’ve done nothing to deserve that. Or any unkindness. Ever.

Good heavens! you prayerfully wail. Let me crawl back into that warm place and hibernate forever.

God (or someone in charge) doesn’t seem to be listening.

2. The taking away… of boob’s sweet milk, of a mum’s and dad’s comforting arms, of the cradle for a crib for a bed, of the bottle for food to moosh around in the mouth.

3. The next child. There are others like you? You thought You Were It. What is this crying thing taking up the attention that belongs solely to you? Why do they not hold you like that? You cry, too, feeling—before you know the word—bereft.

4. And that rhymes with being left. At daycare. Or some strange place with strangers. At this thing called school where other small people (and some big ones) can be so unkind. One day they want to play with you and the next they don’t. Or call you names, make you feel like crawling up your own armhole.

5. Failure. Or what feels like it. If you are lucky, it’s not fatal. It just feels like it. The test you fail, written or spoken, with someone you didn’t know was testing you. Sometimes you feel that you have failed, and you may not have, but that feeling deepens the cracks in your little hearts nonetheless.

6. The friend who no longer loves you. The lover who no longer loves you. The spouse even.

7. The employer who no longer thinks highly of you. May well fire you. Does fire you. The job that didn’t work out after that one either. And maybe the next one.

8. The big whoppers: This one dies. That one dies. Whether your first pets or our older-than-god-grandparents, they disappear. Forever. And then your dear friends and those you never knew but have admired from afar. Their loss stings longer than you think it should. Spouses and parents, even. Good ones who adored you. Poof!

9. Watching your home/your life/your country burn. And you with only the smallest fire extinguisher that, once spent, can no more quell the flames than can your tiny feet trying to stomp them out. This is wrong! you cry. It’s not fair! And you are not wrong.

You feel your heart crack in the same spots it has for years, thinking, This time it’s over. We’re done for. And, flailing, you reach out a hand only to find, to your surprise, another hand meeting yours. And you look at the one attached to that hand and see that someone else is holding their hand, and, down the line, someone else and someone else—this great human chain of kindness, which you thought had burnt up long ago.

And this, it turns out, is how you begin to patch up your cracked heart. By borrowing pieces of the generous hearts of others, so many of whom are happy to donate parts of their own broken hearts, to you. Yes, you. As you will in turn (as you have done, actually, for a long time now) to someone standing next to you. You will reach out your hand and connect to a hand you don’t know. A stranger’s just a friend waiting to happen. So let it happen.

10. And oh, the magic, the mystical, the inexplicability of closing your eyes and finding a long-gone beloved there, or awakening and feeling that you’ve just been with them in a dream you can’t quite recall. The joy-tinged sorrow of that. Or walking in the door and smelling their scent that disappeared years before. Of finding the companion spirits in attendance, as they’ve always been, the gods and goddesses hand in hand with the guardian angels working overtime on your behalf, wielding their little patch kits, lining the cracks in your heart with gold, making it shine—the light at the edge of your darkness.

Let it shine. Oh, let it shine.

•••

• See the whole Emma Thompson interview at the 26th annual New Yorker Festival

• “A stranger’s just a friend waiting to happen.” (Antsy McClain, “When You’re Laughing”)

• “The light at the edge of your darkness. Let it shine. Oh, let it shine.” (Dan Fogelberg, “There’s a Place in the World for a Gambler”)

Just look at them flaunting their true colors
that have lain hidden under their modest green
robes since spring.

Some leafy one must flip a switch, and the trees
that participate go all-out like the drag queens
they secretly are for the rest of the year.

We, their appreciative audience, stop on our walks,
in our cars to gawk and take photos of such
short-lived seasonal fabulousness

before they drop it all and let us see what they’re
truly made of, standing tall and proud,
each one of them such a beauty.

(on World AIDS Day 2025)

Because of those men who lived, dying,
in the houses of friends like my
sister-in-law—and so many others—

men looking like victims of famine,
skin stretched tight over skulls, men whose
hands we held in the early 1980s when we

stayed with Annie in her Noe Valley Victorian.
And because later, after my husband’s heart
surgery and blood transfusions in San Francisco,

we had to be tested for a good decade. Because
he had other people’s blood in him, we found
ourselves at the epicenter of the epidemic.

We lived with the risk, too. And yes, because
we knew people who died, holding our breaths
until the results thankfully came back:

negative, negative, negative. We cheered
the miracle of the first antiretroviral drugs,
watching people live longer and longer.

Some 1.2 million Americans still live with HIV.
They remember, as do I—even if our government
now chooses not to—how many did not.

Still do not. More than 600,000 die worldwide
each year with HIV, many of them children.
If my husband were still here, if a stroke

had not shut down his brain and heart in 2001,
if Annie were still here, had she not died
six months after her brother, they would share

my outrage as citizens of this country that until
recently saw it as its duty to contribute mightily
to the global eradication of this disease,

a nation that only last year on World AIDS Day
displayed the AIDS memorial quilt on the White
House lawn, a small part of the gigantic whole—

each square created in memory of someone
who perished, as heroic as those who gave
their lives when they shouldn’t have had to.

•••

• “For the first time since 1988, the U.S. is not officially commemorating World AIDS Day,” NPR, Dec. 1, 2025.

• AIDS statistics from the World Health Organization.

Behold this day, for it is yours to make.
—Black Elk

And given that the average human
on the globe has approximately
26,280 days (or 72 years),

you don’t have time to waste.
I often think of my late husband
who didn’t even achieve 18,000

days, though he’d hoped for more.
Which is one reason I cherish
every birthday and count even

the half birthdays. “Your years
are your wealth, darlin’, ” my
grandmother used to say, who

clocked more than 30,000 days
on the planet. Her daughter,
my mother, beat that number

by a whopping 4,000 or so days,
which means, my sister and I
figure, that she really got her

money’s worth out of that lifetime.
And she hoped she’d get to start
over, arrive anew and try again.

The point is: Make hay with
each day. It’s yours to make.
Add something to the world,

preferably along the lines of
kindness. You’re here to live
and grow in love, after all.

And along the way enjoy yourself,
should you have the privilege
of a long life. Or any life, really.

We don’t get to bop around in
bodies all that often, and if
reincarnation is really a thing,

and we might show up again
as something more than
a dung beetle, cherish that

lucky lifetime, too. In the
meantime, while you’re here,
behold this day. Hold it gently,

and hold others that way, too.
Clasp it to you. Use it well
like the precious thing it is.

But you think it is, as you wrap yourself
in her bathrobe, swaddled in so much
missing her, a great ball of grief

that cannot, will not, untangle.
And you don’t want it to. You want
her back with a fiery fervor,

the shade the leaves should be this
time of year. But the colors are all
wrong, and her voice lives only

in your head now, but even that
no longer sounds like her—muddled
and mooshy, barely detectable.

You fear every moment when
sadness leaps around a corner
like a playful kitten, little claws

reaching for you. But, dear one,
that’s her. Every tender moment,
every bubble of fear rising

in your chest—she’s there for you.
The mystery is not where our
loved ones go when they go,

but the ways our relationships
with them deepen and flow
like rivers. You are not the you

you think you were, without
her hand on your back or her smile
greeting you at the door.

Once they’re companion spirits
tucked into our pockets, we need only
to reach in a hand to retrieve them,

fingers deep in the void, grasping
the perennial wad of her tissues
you can’t bear to part with.

She’s dead, your mind insists.
And then the eternal knowing
beams through you like sunlight:

No, honey, I’m right here.
I’m not going anywhere.
And there she is,

showing up in the leaves
going crimson and gold
at last, in the autumn

breeze lifting your hair,
sorrow on the move,
cooling your flushed cheeks,

the gentlest nudge,
as hers have always been
and, thankfully, always will be.

•••

(for Rebecca)

(for Annie and Nikki)

I am drowning in Mom bling,
the woman who went, always,
for the shiny, the glitzy,
who, upon her departure,
left behind more necklaces
than she could ever wear.

And I, having met and fallen for
a little girl immigrating from China
with her new American mama
nine years ago, remember
that little girl arriving in her
wheelchair wearing over-the-top,
pink, sparkly, low-heeled
dress-up shoes,

which was OK in a way since
she could not walk, so the shoes
were really foot bling, and, even
with a language barrier, we could
tell pleased her enormously.

Now that girl is 16 with a driver’s
license to wheel around her power chair,
and she still loves her some bling.
She may not remember that she has
a link to my mama, who, years ago,
in one of her best moments, came
to the hospital to sit with the little girl
during a long recovery.

So I shine up some of the tarnished
bling and offer it to the now big girl
and her mama, who look through it
and choose pieces with glee—

some of it tasteful, some not,
but it doesn’t matter. This is for
dress-up, for fun, to hold up
and watch a big girl who is
learning to wheel herself
through life light up when

a fancy bit of bling is draped
around her neck, her brilliant
smile outshining the bright
metal and eye-catching stones.

And, watching them, I feel the presence
of the woman who once wore it
grinning her approval, applauding
their choices from her place
in the great upper balcony
of the firmament.

(for Ashley and Kevin)

The one where we grew up, which is no longer ours,
which belongs to the next generation in the family
who have, thankfully, spiffed it up and made it their own,

so much so that if my sister and I closed our eyes,
we could still walk down the long hallway on a
newly revealed, long-hidden wood floor, and find

the bathroom between our two former bedrooms,
with a lovely tile floor, fresh paint and a far
nicer shower, sink potty than the ones we knew.

Our forebears have gone. We are the elders at
the table now, along with the parents of the young
wife in this house, whose young husband

resembles his grandfather, our father who
brought our little family here in 1966, the guy
who all winter was itching for summer,

antsy to get the turquoise ski boat back
in the lake across the street. The boat still
lives here, and today new relatives visit—

little ones and grownup sisters and their
partners and another grandma, too. And we
who sat in this room last year, watching

our mother finish a long lifetime,
find ourselves a mixture of grateful and
gobsmacked by the transformation,

thankful this Thanksgiving for the carrying on,
for the restart, as we feel the presence
of the ones who set us down in this house

so long ago, who left behind—to our surprise—
only the love and a ski boat born a half century ago,
eager to find the water again.

Years ago, working to retire
my heartfelt litany of
I’m sorrys, I decided

to replace them with
a dozen or more simple
thank yous each day.

Not that I keep track,
but I still toss handfuls
of gratitude to the wind

like the tiny specks of seed
that my neighbor leaves
on the corner of our block

for our wild bird friends,
trusting that those in need
will find it. And that some

who land, briefly peck, then
take off again, will fly away
with perhaps a bit more

than they need, prompting
them to drop morsels
of kindness where others

may pick it up and pass it on.
As you do, again and again—
and you and you and you—

thank you very much,
as I do, too,
just because we can.

(for Donna)

Because for a woman who retired after
a long career as a traveling physical therapist
just in time to do daily care for her first
grandchild—something she very much
wanted to do—

last year juggling that with coordinating
the last months of our mother’s life
with extraordinary patience and kindness,
then doing the heavy lifting of clearing
out her house and settling her estate,

and recently having entered her own Medicare
years—though she looks a good twenty years
younger—

and because a second grandchild came along
so now she and my best brother-in-law ever
are chasing around two little ones under 3
and making it look like no big deal.

Today I watched my sister hoist her
granddaughter into an on-the back
carrier and shouldered the kid, then,
when the toddler boy had a tearful
moment, picked him up, too.

And my mind reeled back more than
three decades when she did the same thing
with her babies—the younger boy
on her back, the older girl in her arms—
that older girl now the mother of these two
that Grandma is currently toting,

all with such grace and patience
that I know she didn’t learn from
our mother, but somehow it was born
in her, this nurturing that allowed her
to become the mother she needed.

And, in doing so, she extends that care
to all around her, including this bigger,
older sister who is beyond grateful
that our parents had the good sense
to produce this sibling for me—
the best little sister ever.

Amen.

I dream of painting, and then I paint my dream.
—Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother
while at Saint-Paul Asylum, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence

•••

He considered “The Starry Night” a failure—
too abstract, straying too far from nature,
painted as he looked out the iron-barred
windows of his rooms in the asylum.

Though he put himself there, though it did
not quell the madness, in a year some
150 paintings, more than 100 drawings
emerged.

It’s still there, the asylum, his upstairs room
and slender iron bed with head- and foot-
boards with more slender, vertical bars.
The ground-floor space where he set his easel,
where expressive, intense colors appeared.

Short, circular brushstrokes animate his
magnum opus—a summer night sky of cobalt
blue with flame-like cypress trees set against
zinc yellow and white whorls of stars.

If this is mania in oils, thickly applied,
we enter it willingly with him.

Never mind that nowadays his famous
dervish stars appear on a million coffee cups
and magnets, making his best-known painting
feel cliché.

But come closer. Focus on that
bright moon casting its sharp beam on
the little village he saw in his imagination,
the tapering points of the tall cypress
connecting earth and sky, life and death.

No failure, that—even as the artist’s mind
tormented him. Even as the whirling
overtook him, defeating the dream of sky
visualized by the one holding the brush,
a human being—like you, like me—

so much more than his suffering,
creating nothing less than a miracle.