For my high school yearbook, when the requisite senior quotes were being collected to garnish the inevitably ugly thumbnail portrait, I spent a long time finding the most appropriate words with which to cement myself in my classmates’ minds for all eternity. I landed on Whitman, his Song of Myself speaking to my vision of myself as an island, living on a different plane than my peers: “Do I contradict myself? Very well then, I contradict myself. I am large, I contain multitudes.”
Not surprisingly, decades later, in our Pinterest-fueled society, this same poem has become memorialized as a meme, and you can order a poster with its words in a million different fonts. Because it’s true. We are all large, we all contain multitudes. Back in 1980 I thought I was being lofty and literary; in fact, I was just ahead of the marketing curve.
But something about the poem sticks with me, in these days of collective grief and the ongoing internal conversation I have with myself about whether anything is worthwhile anymore. Four years into widowhood, I am caught between two worlds – the world I knew, that I created and nurtured with my husband and our children, the world that included a house and a career and friends and a vision for our family and the future together … and the apocalyptic world I inhabit now, that revolves around grief and loss and the ground shifting under my feet every day and a new love and partner who lives far away and has no relationship to any of the before and who sits and waits for me in another house, in another city, where we cultivate our own private version of a new future that propels me forward but doesn’t exist in the real time residue of my former universe.
I am keenly aware that the people who inhabit the structures of my old life love me and value me and want to protect me from any more hurt and danger. They love that I am in love, but perhaps a tad wary of my new partner’s commitment, especially since they don’t see him often – we live our lives together in his city, not mine. We do not fit into the traditional mold of my long-married friends who are watching their children launch and figure out their own futures, occasionally flying back to the nest for sustenance and love. He and I now are cut from a different cloth, our decisions welded in the brimstone that is the aftermath of death and divorce. We are trying to figure out how to proceed, as a unit, in a world that is configured around permanence. We are paralyzed by our former lives, any real decisions hampered by responsibilities and fear. We are not blended, nor will we be in any sort of traditional way that would make sense to the outside world.
I like the cleavage of my life now. I like having two lives, one here and one there. One with the trappings of everything and everyone familiar; one cosseted by the walls of a far-away temporary nest, where two people have found each other, protect and love each other, and poke at the idea of a future together. But in truth, the future is now, and the only permanence is our transience.
I’ve always had a hard time fitting in. I thought I had found the answer when I pushed my way into a life and an observance whose time clock and celebrations revolved around the holidays and traditions of a religion that was mine to adopt but not borne in my bones. It gave me scaffolding, a set of values to wrestle with, a community that was willing to adopt me and embrace our family unit. But when that unit burst, never to be made whole again, I could no longer find comfort in the rituals and conventions of something whose most basic belief ran serrated against my own lack thereof. I once again felt I did not belong.
So I sit, strapped to my front porch in the heat of a pandemic, not allowed to move forward, too altered to look back. Wondering if the multitudes of my life will continue to shift, eventually finding a resting place where I can once again build a home, if even for a short while.
Comments