Under the Dome

I originally posted this "review" to Goodreads. I thought I'd give it a little extra rotation over here. Yesterday, on day 81 of his stay at York Hospital, Pop was moved to HealthSouth Rehabilitation Hospital to begin the intensive and arduous task of re-learning to stand, then walk, and swallow again. He is on the upswing and I am so proud of how hard he's been fighting. I hope I've inherited some of those genes, and at least a little bit of his determination.

Originally posted to Goodreads:

This isn't really a review. It's a story about the circumstances under which I read this book. But, given those circumstances, I thought I'd take the liberty of posting this instead of a review. The book, by the way, was fantastic.

June 17, 2010

11:59 p.m.

Under the Dome

This has been a difficult year. I’ve lost count of how many funerals there have been for people I deeply admired, and some for people I deeply loved. I resigned from my job, and, in a sense, my community. To hide out and catch my breath.

And then, just when you think you cannot possibly shoulder any more, life has a way of throwing a Molotov cocktail through your living room window while you’re inside, lying on the couch.

Several long months after my aunt passed away, after the nightmare of discovering the secret life she was living, I found a Borders gift card she’d given me for Christmas only two months before she died. It just turned up one day, appearing in a gift bag filled with what I thought were empty boxes and envelopes, cast aside on the floor next to the daybed in the guest room. It was unmistakable, how it popped up in the same fashion as one of her unexpected phone calls used to come: a pleasant, eccentric little surprise.

I carried the gift card around in my purse for about a week, before making a trip to Borders to get the newest Stephen King book, Under the Dome. Although I often say that Stephen King is the reason I love to read, the reason I love to write, I couldn’t bring myself to buy the hefty hardcover. It tops out at 1074 pages and carried a $35 price tag. I reasoned that people without jobs should wait for paperback. No matter that I’d never in my life waited for a Stephen King book to come out in paperback. I’d never waited past the release date to purchase one, and rarely a week to finish reading one. Things had changed, but one thing remained the same – even in death, my aunt had managed to get me a wonderful gift I never would have splurged on for myself.

The book wasn’t easy to tote around for a few stolen minutes here and there, but I tried. The most I’d get to spend with it at a stretch was during the mandatory 20-minute wait after my allergy shots every other week, so I eventually just kept it in the car for those sessions. I figured it would take me the entire summer to read it.

I was about 100 pages deep, two months after I first cracked the book open, when my grandfather was rushed to the hospital on a Friday morning. I had taken the second shift hanging around the ICU waiting room, relieving my mother, who had spent the afternoon there. She came home to stay with my son, and threw a sweatshirt and a book into a bag for me to take to my grandmother. “A book?,” I asked. She shrugged and said any distraction would be welcome. So when I got to the hospital, I grabbed my own book off the passenger seat and took that in with me, too.

The next five days are a blur of waiting, waiting, waiting in the windowless room where surgeons and specialists would appear at irregular intervals to bring news of my grandfather’s fight for his life. And in between, unable to bear the slow crawl of the clock, I opened the giant book on my lap and read.

A constantly shifting cast of characters moved in and out of the waiting room. At one point, a nurse peeked her head into the room to ask the waiting room attendant, “do you want that book now?” The attendant nodded, and the nurse returned from her break with a copy of the book I was reading. She noticed me sitting there, lost in the book, and said, “heeey! She’s reading the same one!” She pointed to the attendant. “I’m loaning it to her to read on vacation.” She came into the room and sat down on the couch next to me. We talked for several delicious, comforting minutes about Stephen King and John Irving. Just two people having a normal conversation, one of them wearing scrubs.

Other people – hospital staff, other people waiting for news of loved ones, even some of my own family members – commented. “That’s a big book,” one man remarked after settling onto the other half of the loveseat I occupied in the large, and otherwise empty room in the wee hours of the first night. I agreed and stuck my nose back in.

When I got to be somewhere around 700 pages in, a panic started settling in around the edges of my mind. What was going to happen when I finished the book? How could I face what was going on without it? But still I pressed on, reading, reading, reading. I am, after all, Stephen King’s Constant Reader.

Yesterday, Pop made it through his third major surgery and to a point where one doctor finally said to us that he thought Pop might make it through. We all breathed a sigh of cautiously optimistic relief and I opened my book.

Tonight, lying on my stomach on my bed, on top of the covers, I finished Under the Dome. I cried silently for the last 20 or so pages. The entire thing was a pedal-to-the-metal page-turner, would have been so even under the most typical circumstances here on my side of the looking-glass. But the intense crescendo of the final scenes wasn’t the only thing that made me weep. I was crying for knowing I’d soon be crawling out from behind the book’s protective shield. Crying over the fact that I’d have to rejoin a world less perfectly choreographed.

I finished reading the author’s note in the final pages, closed the back cover, and lay my head down in my arms and sobbed. I discovered I was also crying from the weight of knowing that I could never do that. Never write anything like it.

And so here I sit, in this flawed world, where we never know what’s going to happen next, or just how much we can bear. There is nothing to do but keep turning the pages, and enjoy the story along the way.

Funerals and Pink Sequins

I know it’s been a long, long time since I posted anything here. Let’s skip the part where I apologize and berate myself, shall we? Good, thanks.

I took the day off work today to attend the funeral of a very dear family friend. Nannie Pearl was the grandmother of my oldest friends, Lauren and Rob, whom I met when I was three years old. I’ve known them, literally, my whole life.

She died the same way she lived: spontaneously. One moment she was here, the next she was gone. It’s left us all in shock. I called a friend who’d grown up with us to tell her the news, and she just seemed confused. “I know,” I told her. “Sure, she was almost 86 years old, but she was Nannie Pearl.”

She had always been there, and hadn’t seemed to change much at all throughout our entire lives, except maybe to slow down a bit, and I don’t think it ever really occurred to any of us that there would ever be a time when she wouldn’t be there. I could picture her at her grandkids’ weddings, could even picture her at her great-granddaughter’s high school graduation (which, at this point, is still almost 8 years away). It’s so strange to try to picture some momentous occasion without her being there.

I shuffled into her church with my parents, trying, for reasons unknown to me now, to be stoic. I was telling myself I wanted to hold it together for my mother, whose anxiety was threatening to make her head explode, for my father, whose joints were stiff with the cold of a windy January day, and for Nannie Pearl’s daughter and grandkids, who I consider extended family. But when we got up near the coffin and saw her with her pink sequined baseball cap in her hand, I lost it. When I reached where Diane, her daughter, was standing, words failed me entirely. Where were any of us to begin expressing our sympathy and our gratitude for having known her?

We took our seats and I stared at the memorial leaflet, which featured a small illustration of a floral arrangement with calla lilies and lilacs. “Lauren likes calla lilies,” I told my mother. That’s why I’d chosen a sympathy card with them on the front.

Next I opened the program. Lauren would be reading from Corinthians 1:13, a passage I’d been asked to read at three weddings (so far). It seemed a fitting way to pay tribute to someone so full of love for life and those around her. I also saw that someone had selected “In the Garden” to be part of the service. I pointed it out to my mother, who raised her eyebrows quizzically. It was my grandmother’s (my mother’s mother’s) favorite hymn. Apparently my mother did not know this.

I felt very glad to know these kinds of things about the people in my life. I’ve always been a walking encyclopedia of these kinds of details, but I don’t ever consciously think about it, or about the fact that this is a gift for which I should be grateful - not everyone is equipped to notice or remember this kind of minutia. I hope there are people who know what kinds of flowers I like (alstromeria, gladiolus, hydrangea) and the very few hymns I know by heart (Peace in the Valley, Up from the Grave He Arose).

I watched as kids I used to babysit, now grown men, filed into the pews, nodding their condolences to each other. I thought of the memories, many of which I’d witnessed firsthand, that must be swirling through their heads.

I have never been someone who goes to church, but I have always admired a pastor who can give a sermon that says just the right things at a wedding, a christening, a funeral; I admire anyone speaking publicly who has this talent. The service was perfect – a comforting remembrance of someone whose faith and love were vast and unconditional.

Diane's eulogy perfectly captured how everyone felt about her mother. She talked about how Nannie never changed, and about her love of shopping that now spans several generations. She said that she wasn’t sure how the Bon-Ton was doing here in the first quarter, but that we might want to consider selling our stocks. We all laughed.

The eulogy was followed by a “time of personal sharing,” during which people stood to say how much Nannie had meant to them and the kinds of things they were going to fondly remember when they thought of her. The recurring theme was that Pearl was always Pearl…she never changed. And everyone kept saying how strange this world will be without her.

For my part, I kept thinking about when Nannie Pearl and Papa Bob would take us kids to the pool in the summer in their station wagon with the wood panels on the side. We did everything together as kids, and Nannie Pearl and Papa Bob were around almost as much as my own grandparents. I remember how devastating it was to hear that Papa Bob had passed away. A few years later, when my son Carter was born (exactly two months after Nannie Pearl’s first and only great-grandchild, Vienna, was born), we gave him the middle name Robert, for several people who were important in his family history, including Lauren’s beloved Papa.

I sat in the church, crying and laughing at the same time as people remembered our Nannie Pearl. I thought of her past pets, her old pink refrigerator from the 50s that was still running until just a few years ago. I thought about the Thanksgiving when she ate my mom’s Jack Daniels cranberry relish on Ritz crackers (there comes a point in any Thanksgiving when anything can become a vehicle for eating more of the JD cranberry relish). I thought about this Thanksgiving, when Lauren and Diane put Nannie in the car and drove her the one block to my parents’ house so she could see the spectacle of my brother and father deep-frying a turkey on the front lawn. I thought of other holidays and birthdays and family outings, and reports from my mother on the funny-but-sage Pearl-isms I’d missed when I was celebrating holidays elsewhere.

I thought of trick-or-treat nights when we were kids and she would come over to help hand out candy, and how every trick-or-treat night since Vienna and Carter were born, how we’ve started with dinner at Diane’s house and then take the kids around to all the houses we used to visit on Halloween when we were their age. What would it be like this year when the kids come back to Diane’s with their loot and Nannie Pearl isn’t there to oversee the Great Candy Trade, when they dump their bags out onto the family room floor?

When we left the church, we walked among our old neighbors, people we’d have been so happy to see and catch up with under different circumstances.

I shivered against the cold and thought of a warmer time, two summers ago, when we sat at the ballpark with Nannie Pearl, and I told her how much I liked her pink sequined cap. She posed for a picture, wearing the sequined cap and her ever-present smile. That’s how I will always remember her: smiling. That will never, ever change.

Pearl Maciolek

March 13, 1924 - January 21, 2010