“I look out the window, and I see the lights and the skyline
and the people on the street rushing around looking for action, love,
and the world’s greatest chocolate chip cookie,
and my heart does a little dance.”
Nora Ephron, Heartburn

There was a time when I was obsessed with everything Nora Ephron. I envied how she was raised by writers with the mantra “everything is copy” while I was raised by my mother not to write anything unless it is positive. I envied how Nora lived and worked her dream job in New York while the city felt lifetimes away for me. And I envied how she was able to be a successful writer, wife, and mother while I struggled to do one at a time. When Nora passed away, her obituary included a list of what she would (and would not) miss. I never fail to forget the last two, “coming over the bridge into Manhattan” and “pie” (from I Remember Nothing).

Re-reading it, I fall in envy all over again. A few of my favorites: “waffles, the concept of waffles… a walk in the park, the idea of a walk in the park… dinner with friends in cities where none of us lives.”

Recently, as warmth finally replaces a seemingly endless rainy spring, I am outside at the picnic bench reflecting on how great it feels to sit in the morning sun, when my body doesn’t have to defend itself against the cold. I will miss the morning sun, I think, and recall with a corresponding sadness, Nora stating she would miss “coming over the bridge.”

Mid-May 2019 I gave myself a gift of promise that I skipped when I was twenty-one.

In the spring of 1991, despite having a paralegal position lined up at a Wall Street law firm, I chose to move home to Northern California with X, my fiancé. With the gift of hindsight, I am forever grateful I was local for my dad’s fatal cancer journey, but it was bittersweet knowing my friends were enjoying our NYC post-graduation years without me. Even though I ultimately went on business trips to the city, I missed a lot of fun times in the name of being married at twenty-two. So when I turned fifty, after getting a green light of encouragement from X and G, I got my own tiny apartment. They had a tentative project booked, and I began interviewing for a job. In our divorced-but-semi-functional family boat, I function as the keel. Our greatest issues arise when I actually want to do something, and my stabilizing element malfunctions.

Meanwhile the groundwork under which the green lights were lit began to falter. The project fell apart, and G’s emotional health followed suit. Although I planned to be back and forth from the city regularly (and there was a bed for her at mine), the need was increasingly urgent, and I began doing a Berkshire/City commute that resembled the swish crowd absent fancy real estate.

While I have said I am a mix of city and country mouse, I didn’t imagine life materializing quite like this. I felt constantly in-between a possible new life and new issues in parenthood. Eighteen may be old enough to die for our country and elect a president, but I have found it to be as fragile as any of the years prior, if not more. The prickly defenses of the previous five years had softened with maturity, and a genuinely tender adult emerged. This took me completely by surprise. (By that age, I was so well-defended, it took me more than a decade of therapy to break down my walls.)

Eventually I stayed up north, expecting to return to the city at any point—as soon as things felt secure—never realizing that this would progress long into my lease, and thanks to Covid-19, consume all of it.

And so I sit in the sun one early May morning and face the fact that I must let go, once again, of the hope of my own place in the city. In a few days I will pack up my little home, put it all in storage, and continue to live this strange Covid-inspired life on my daughter’s couch.

I named this blog Where I End and She Begins – A Parenting Journey from Attachment to Non-Attachment as a way of housing and possibly promoting the manuscript I wrote about raising a child out of the shadows of late miscarriage/early stillbirth. My conclusion: we survive and our roads may be richer for the loss. But lessons of non-attachment seem to keep coming and could not be more acute than they are now.

Since last fall, I have been living out of my suitcase in G’s one-bedroom apartment. I have none of my treasures and comforts, but I have a roof over my head and an evolving, complex, extraordinary, intense, exhausting, magical relationship with my adult-child. While honored to have been asked to walk the walk I talk about, I have never been so uncertain how this will progress. But I do see an ending to my place on the UES.

I had yet to write about my arrival. I never changed my address. I don’t think I ever spent a full week there, yet I held continued faith that I would be coming back. I can’t think of an example where I have been as wrong except the longevity of X’s and my marital vows. Yet knowing my apartment was there gave me a lot of comfort. It hurts more than I’m willing to admit that it is unlikely I will get the chance to take the bridge to Manhattan again, knowing it is home.

I have joked that Covid-19 did one nice thing: it made this decision easier. The city I leave on the last day of May is decidedly not the city I joined over a year ago.

Haven’t the quarantine and virus left the taste of grief on everyone’s lips? I feel it has for many, even those who have not borne the greatest burdens of losing loved ones, getting sick or becoming unemployed. Missed events, experiences, travels. Fear, anxiety, depression, isolation, separation. It feels like the world has been saturated in insecurity, frozen in place, and given no map for return. How this grief manifests is different for each of us, definitively worse for some. But sadly it is so pervasive it feels wrong to complain. There is no one to call. We are lucky to be alive and well. No one has died. I am just losing a dream, a lost piece of promise I tried to restore, a sense of my-own-ness.

On Nora’s list of what she will miss is “next year in Istanbul.” I envy how her economy of words still can stab the heart. All of us on this side of the veil don’t have any idea what we will or will not see next year on a level of existential gravitas that is mind-numbing. Will international borders re-open? How will Americans be received overseas? Will it be safe enough to go anywhere? I have half a mind to leave my possessions in a storage unit and travel. While I miss having a home with indescribable longing, I have gotten accustomed to living with little. I want to walk the Camino de Santiago and have people say “blessed camino to you” each day. This may surpass want into the realm of need. I would like to depart tonight.

One thing I have done for myself in the past nine months is study interfaith ministry. I hope to be ordained in August. It was fascinating to see how my classes ran parallel with our path, and how it helped me see caring for a loved one as a form of ministry. This helped to ground and elevate me during some difficult days.

Here in quarantine, I realize I want to live more, and there are moments in which I worry I won’t. I want to write a new list of things I will miss that I haven’t yet found. I am not finished; in many respects, I have barely started. I am concerned there is so much more living I want to do that I might be pushing away those I love in a sense of desperation that I will not have done enough when my time ends.

On this day of thinking about Nora and the city and letting go, I am inspired to write my own list.

I will miss my apartment and the knowledge that my apartment exists. But I also will miss the country, wet moors, a river rushing by and birds speaking their certainties. I will miss staying in bed late, a dog or cat asleep beside me, writing and reflecting. I will miss preparing for a party, getting into a pool on a hot day, pausing to take a photograph, getting dressed up, the feeling of the wind in my hair, the sacredness of saying hello and goodbye, and the promise of tomorrow. I will miss rain on my face, watching snow fall and the buds of spring emerge. I will miss the sunrise and a clear night sky and witnessing people being kind. I will miss laughing, too, but Nora already used that one.

I want to be clear that I am not finished with this mortal coil, but the coronavirus seems to be forcing me to think about all of these things. About Nora and her list. About what we have yet to do. About people like Johnny and Becky and Leslie and Doug and Stephen who left us way too soon but consequently cannot get hurt by Covid-19. And about my parents who already left, gratefully in advance of this terror.

If you would like to play, I would love to hear what you will miss, either below or privately.

With much love and prayers for your safety.

 

For Nora’s full list: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2012/jun/27/nora-ephron-likes-and-dislikes

Photo taken around midnight with G, on a round-trip tram ride back from Roosevelt Island, about to land at 59^th St and 2^nd Ave.