Survival and crumbs of joy

Marking a difficult anniversary - and a favorite poet's birthday

One year ago today, on a perfect fall morning, my 12-year-old asked me to take him to the doctor to check out a sore throat.

It was Sunday, so I made an appointment at a walk-in clinic.

Instead, we wound up in the emergency room - my son in the children’s hospital and me in the adult hospital next door. He would wind up staying in the hospital for over a week - a week that still haunts me when I think about the pain he was in and the fear I felt.

I couldn’t disclose this when I wrote about the car accident last year, but now that it’s been adjudicated: my son and I were victims in a head-on collision with a drunk driver. I am grateful that we all three survived, albeit with injuries.

Navigating the legal system was, and still is, a process. I am extremely fortunate to have had the time, resources, and knowledge to do so. Same with the medical stuff. I saw firsthand how our systems tend to work counterintuitively, or not at all.

My son has dealt with a lot in the past year, and I have another surgery coming up later this month. But we were so lucky it wasn’t far worse.

I’ve been dreading this anniversary ever since the calendar rolled over to September. Normally, I love this time of year - the perfect, cool air; the shift of energy; men in sweaters! But the body remembers, and I’ve felt a lot of anxiety leading up to this anniversary.

So it was kind of perfect when I woke up this morning and realized that September 10 is also the birthday of the beloved late poet Mary Oliver. On Instagram, I’d shared a reading of one of her poems - one of my favorite poems in the world - which was also read at my wedding: Don’t Hesitate.

It felt like a perfect message for a second marriage - about embracing joy and accepting that some things break and won’t every really be fixed. And yet, if we are alive, there is always “some possibility left.”

We seek redemption, whether or not we find it, we have to move forward.

The poem ends with a line that I think the rabbi who performed our interfaith ceremony thought was kind of weird - he chuckled and asked, “Joy is not to be made a crumb?”

I’ve contemplated that line often. And the idea of a crumb - a small, barely-salvageable remnant of something. Sometimes that’s all there is for us, but sometimes we ask for more and we do get it.

A second wedding is like that. The days after a could-have-been-much-worse car accident are like that.

If there was any lesson from the accident, it’s to embrace the moments of joy, like Mary Oliver said. Wherever and whenever we find it. Be they crumbs or cups running over.

Speaking of crumbs, here’s another poem I’m obsessed with: A Crumb in the Cobblestone—Tell Me This Landscape Darkened Without You, by Jerika Marchan.

I have been obsessed with this poem from the moment I ran across it about six years ago, during a restless time when nothing felt quite right. You should probably just read it, but for me, it has everything - religion, sex, yearning for something greater - in a handful of short, enigmatic lines.

I’ve read it hundreds of times and can’t tell you what it means exactly, but I love the way Marchan compares herself to the crumb: “waiting for discovery or disintegration.” I loved those lines so much I bought her whole book.

We are always so close to disintegration. Or to discovery. We never know how close, or which one.

Tonight, in between work and practice and evening activities - and that debate thing we’ll all be watching soon - my husband and I took the boys to dinner at a favorite barbecue spot (it’s Virginia, so not as good as what we had in Kansas City, but we get by).

AI prompt: “death sauce bbq sauce”

Inveterate spicy food lover that I am (if it doesn’t hurt at least a little, what’s the point?), I grabbed the bottle of “Death Sauce” with its exaggerated font and started pouring it on my plate.

“Mom,” the now-13-year-old teased. “It’s the anniversary of our accident. Don’t you think we should be celebrating life?”

Yes, buddy, I absolutely do.