Everything Is Sacred

Posted September 07, 2007

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I am a melancholy type, I know. A joyful, grateful, manic melancholic. As I've gotten older -- and since the kids were born -- I live in a state that might best be described as anticipation of grief. I am very happy. It's just that so often the scenes of my life glisten as if they have been brushed with a kind of elegiac gloss -- everything shining in the particular way it does just before it ends. It is worse in some moments: my parents standing together on the lawn of their summerhouse, waving to us as we drive away from a perfect weekend, the kids craning towards the car windows to wave back. "I just want it to be this weekend for the entire rest of my life," I always say to Michael, and dab surreptitiously at my eyes with Kleenex. I want the kids to be little like this, and my parents to be as young as they are, and the trees to be leafy, everybody healthy, our car not flipping off the road like it surely will after such a cinematically perfect moment of love and happiness.

Right now the story of Jim and Kati Kim is like a frosted window in my head, and I am seeing everything in my life through its cold glass. The first time I learned of them was from the lovely nurse who gives me my flu shot every year. "Have you heard about that family they rescued today?" She was rubbing my arm with alcohol. "The mom kept her daughters alive by nursing them for nine days -- a baby and a four-year-old." And then it was the small sting of the needle, my eyes watering, my heart bursting with this story I didn't even understand yet. I pictured the movie Life Is Beautiful: to be so afraid -- for yourself and your children above all -- but to have those kids watching you, looking to you for cues about how to feel. Even as your own despair might have been setting in.

I still haven't read much about the details of those endless nine days since, of course, their survival was immediately shadowed by the tragic news of the father's death. But I have imagined what it was like to be Kati Kim -- cold and hungry and afraid, but turning the whole thing into a camping adventure, maybe, or a "let's pretend you're my baby again" game for the four-year-old, who might have been surprised to find herself nursing again. I can't help pumping my fist in the air a little bit over the wonders of the breastfeeding body -- its incredible heroism. Not that I think everybody can or even should nurse their babies -- but how incredible that she was able to keep her family alive that way. Since my own lunatic breasts are still producing milk two years -- two years! -- after weaning Birdy, I had to mentally cover their ears while I read this survival tale. I'm afraid it confirms all their worst fears: We should keep making milk, they likely mutter to themselves a hundred times a day. You never know what might happen. Which is true, of course.

Michael and I had different reactions to the story. I wondered if he would identify with the father -- out on foot in the treachery of unfamiliar land, fighting the cold to save his family -- but he didn't really. For him it's a story about another family who experienced a sad turn in their luck. It's not about us. And it's not. But. Perhaps it's the breastfeeding piece: I remember how anxious I felt about keeping the babies alive when I was simply holding them in the warm comfort of the glide rocker, food and heat and shelter at my disposal. To be charged with keeping children alive -- to be the keepers of the powerful beauty of their being. It is the most frightening task. And it's a responsibility felt the world over, every minute of every day, in places where the tools you have -- contaminated water, too little food, war, fear -- are all wrong for the job.

In this house where I live, nobody will let you moon around for long, and I'm lucky in that way. Everybody's a comedian. "Where are the bloopers?" Michael will joke, scanning through the DVD's Special Feature's menu after we watch, say, Sophie's Choice. Or my parents who were just here, telling us a story about a couple who had driven off the road on the way home from visiting their kids, and how they weren't found for days and days. But even as I'm seized with the horror of it, my father is already laughing, teasing my mom for referring to them as "elderly" even though they were a good decade younger than my parents. "Careful!" my dad joked to me in the car later when a college student was crossing in front of us, "Don't hit that elderly woman!" "What?" my mother yells, because all they do is tease each other about being hard of hearing. And then Birdy pipes up from the back, "Maybe if I have to die I could die for just one tiny second!" And we all laugh. Nothing is sacred around here. But really everything is.

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Everything Is Sacred

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Dalai Mama Dishes

by Catherine Newman

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Dalai Mama Dishes

Catherine Newman cooks for the family

Everything Is Sacred

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