He was a scrappy short kid, always very good-looking, always ready for a fight. His mother loved him with a large and generous love, but his father was cruel and strict, often giving him beatings. He dropped out of school in seventh grade; his teacher walked miles to his house to beg his parents to make him stay in, but it did no good. He was stubborn and wanted what he wanted, to get a job to earn money to buy a car, nice clothes, to run with the gang even though his father made him work in the store. I think he was strict with his daughters because he wanted to protect us from the dangerous world and tough angry boys like he had been.
My father was never around that much when I was growing up and it made me sad and angry.
Part of my developing strategy was to be open and vulnerable in my own writing to encourage them to do the same, and to share parts of my life that might resonate with theirs. My father’s story certainly did, as did many aspects of my own.
Our unfolding similarities had me hooked.
And I wasn’t giving up on any of them. Who knew when the breakthroughs would come? I just had to keep showing up, right? I had a mission, now, a purpose.
Their pain was pushing mine into a corner.
• • •
The girls really seemed to love it when I read to them.
“That gives me hope, Sharon,” La Toya said in response to the story I offered at our next meeting from Sugar In the Raw, an anthology of young black female teenagers’ experiences that focused on race.
“It helps, ’cause I’m leaving tomorrow,” La Toya added, fluffing up her latest hairdo.
Mayra seemed to be spiraling into deeper distress. She’d gotten a pass to go home over the weekend, but it turned out that the mother she so adored had gone to Puerto Rico and hadn’t even told her she was going. Mayra was furious and heartbroken.
“Maybe I should just get an apartment for independent living instead of trying to go home,” she said to me, her dark eyes hooded with confusion and sadness.
“Can you do that? I mean, are you old enough?”
“Yes, Sharon. But I will kill myself if anything happens to my mother.”
“You mean you’ll feel really sad, maybe like not wanting to live.”
“No, I’ll kill myself.”
Kaylee wrote about how no one understood or could hear her and it would be easier to be under the ground.
“I couldn’t read my first piece because everyone would be on top of me.”
“What do you mean, Kaylee?”
She just kept repeating that. Finally La Toya said they’d just do “a tight” on her. So I guessed she had suicidal ideation, or maybe was really suicidal. She and La Toya were terrified of going home, of what unknown waited there.
Or maybe a formerly fearsome known.
Nia wrote her opinion of a healthy sex life: if you sleep with someone you should love that person.
Okay, I thought, that’s good.
La Toya had had a biopsy done on nodes under her arm. While the other girls were threatening to kill themselves, she was worried about dying. Her aunt had had breast cancer at sixteen, she said, and her grandmother has it too, she told me, serious and scared. And La Toya was in a gang, so she’d have to deal with that pressure when she got home.
I was overwhelmed again. Nothing I had ever known or experienced had prepared me for these discussions, these litanies of anguish. There were no more easy solutions here than there had been for my son’s death, any more than there were for me.
A staff member came in with the new girl, Tiffany. Despite the resistance they’d voiced before, to my surprise, no one protested. Tiffany was arresting, a flawless caramel color with jet-black hair gelled into ringlets and a fierce anger I could see even from a distance, like steam rising.
The group was changing already, and it seemed that we’d only just found stable ground.
I felt scared and dumb. Every week I was faced with something I’d not been able to anticipate and plan for.
At a time when it would have been helpful to remember those four noble truths of the Buddha and the insight they offered, I panicked, worried that Tiffany would unbalance the group and that the old girls would reject her.
I had no control, none at all.
Seven years before starting my program at Touchstone, I visited Taos, New Mexico, for a workshop with Natalie Goldberg, a writing guru from whom I have learned so much that helped me in the writing groups I’d led for women, and now these at Touchstone. There I met Clara Rosemarda, a psychic, who offered to give us “readings.”
At that time, only five years after Geoff had died, I was mired in a cavernous hole of anguish, with no clue as to how to climb out. Skeptical, cynical, I refused to consider having a reading until it was almost time to leave. But, desperate with distress, I reluctantly decided to give her a try. After all, I had come all the way to New Mexico, the land of free spirits, alternative lifestyles, and curative mineral springs, in search of something. Maybe this reading could be the succor I’d sought.
I don’t remember much of what Clara said except that I was in a very dark place, and that I needed to meditate.
Meditate! I wanted no part of that, imagining a roomful of white robed devotees bowing to a guru-master, male, probably, like the guru Maharaj-Ji my brothers-in-law had worshipped. My long Catholic experience with empty rituals had soured me on anything that had even a faint scent of religion.
I’d left that Catholic church in 1970, but when we’d needed to bury Geoff, we’d chosen a Catholic cemetery. In order to do this, we’d been required to have a priest be co-celebrant at the memorial service held in the Congregational church, presided over by a caring minister with whom I’d worked at the local mental health center.
We asked my husband’s father’s cousin, a monsignor who had married us, and he’d refused, saying he had prior plans, presiding at a communion, I think. His own cousin’s grandson! But I knew the reason for his demurral was the non-Catholic service.
Fortunately, friends scrambled and found us a more broadminded and humane priest. This experience, along with countless others, had only cemented the certainty that I was right in my decision to erase religion from my life. But I’d been left with an echoing hollow where God and prayer had been, at a time in my life when something spiritual might have been a useful life jacket.
“Sharon, how’d it go with Clara?” my friend Polly asked after the reading.
“Oh, okay, I guess. Interesting. She told me I should meditate.” I didn’t know that Polly had a long practice of mindfulness meditation and had lived with her family for years at the Lama Foundation, a spiritual community in the Sangre De Cristo mountains, seventeen miles north of Taos.
“Well? Are you going to?”
“No way.” Actually, I had no real idea what meditation was, or what it would have entailed, but then I was determined to keep believing that nothing could help me. I was caught in grief like a mouse in one of those sticky traps, still alive, but unable to move forward or get free. And I wasn’t sure I wanted to get free. To do so would have felt like a betrayal of my love for my son.
“Look, Sharon, there’s a retreat coming up this summer at Lama Foundation. It’s ten days, and Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzburg are leading it. They are fantastic. You have to come.” (Joseph and Sharon are two of the preeminent Western meditation teachers of our time).
“No way, Polly. I can’t. I don’t want to, anyway. I