Dressing Up the Mother of the Groom

Posted on May 21, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

Mother of the Groom silk

This body likes hiking boots and jeans. It digs deep wide holes for plants and spades out dandelion roots. It likes broad brimmed hats and Vic’s old broadcloth shirts instead of sunscreen. In winter, it pulls on snow pants, down vests, and fleece hats. It appreciates brown rice and organic vegetables. I count on this body, even when I whine about round thighs and wrinkles. Slowly, day by day with me hardly noticing, this body became a gray-haired crone. And I admit that since Vic died, I haven’t done much to decorate the old girl.

In June, she will be part of my son David’s wedding as he takes Liz McFarlane to be his wife. This body needs to do two things: walk with composure at David’s side to give him away to his bride and read a poem by Robert Bly with a few words of my own. I fret about weeping at the wedding without Vic at my side.

“We’ll all cry,” Liz says. “Don’t worry about it.” Continue reading →

Remember What You Love: Deep Friendship and Thriving Plants

Posted on May 14, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

with Dotty Motheral

“Do something you used to love, even if you don’t care about it right now,” my son David advised the spring after his dad died. “Then something you always loved will be waiting for you.”

Gardening has calmed and nurtured me since my dad and I planted onions and radishes in the backyard when I was in the seventh grade, but as the weather warmed this spring, I passively watched weeds consume my favorite perennial garden. Lilies tried to force their way through the grass mat, but I didn’t have the will to help them out. Continue reading →

For the Love of Trees: 2005

Posted on May 7, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

“Come on, Elaine, let’s dress up in our Hector regional costumes and take a photo for the party invitation.”

“I have gardening to do, Vic. Let’s do it tomorrow.”

“No, today,” Vic insists. “It’s a perfect day. You’ll be glad we did it.”

I reluctantly take off my shorts and pull on overalls, rubber boots, and a big straw hat. Vic grabs a spade fork and a shovel. I put Daisy on a leash so she won’t wander off to hunt. Vic arranges his tripod, sets up the shot, and puts the camera on delay. Leaping and laughing, he hurries next to me in time for the camera click. Continue reading →

Writing through the Rough Spots: Healing through Story

Posted on April 30, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

Elllen Schmidt

“Write a list of questions,” Ellen instructed. “Anything that comes to mind. Just let your pen flow across the page.” I sat around Ellen’s cozy table with a small group of students and began.

“Will I ever be happy again?”
“Should I get a puppy?”
“What do I love?”
“Can I survive without Vic’s love?”
“Is the woman I was a year ago as dead as Vic?”
“Who is the Green Man?”

I wrote a page of questions, and as I wrote, tears dripped down my cheeks. Continue reading →

California Hippie Capers: 1968

Posted on April 23, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

Midpeninsula Free University catalog 1968

Vic and I were in Palo Alto at the Free University Psychodrama Commune where residents were free to express every feeling and do what they wanted as long as they told the truth about it. Robb Crist swept into the living room while Vic and I shared a welcome-to-California smoke. Robb was surprisingly pleased to see us and asked if we could spare an hour to help him out. Vic and I were in California for adventure, so why not?

Robb was a wild man, but you’d never know at first glance. He looked as straight and sober as a banker, although he was willing to join any revolution, ingest any pill, or try any experiment. He was also the disciplined driving force behind the 1000+ member Midpeninsula Free University. Continue reading →

When I Leave My Home: Love, Loss, and Continuing Bonds

Posted on April 16, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

photo by wayneandwax, flicker.com

I arranged glass canning jars on the wooden shelves in the cellar to please my eye—apricots between red cherries and crimson tomatoes, purple red plums next to pink tinged peaches. A rainbow of jams filled the higher shelves. We bought a freezer for the garden bounty and a washing machine for sanity. After the romance of wet diapers hanging on racks by the wood stove ended, we added a dryer, too.

When I leave this 200 year old home where I’ve lived since 1973, only the memory of this cellar will go with me.

Along with drying firewood, the barn houses Vic’s orange Kubota tractor with a bushhog, rototiller, wagon, and front loader, plus shelves of oils, greases, saws, manuals, and jars of screws and nails. The end of the barn near the vegetable garden holds my garden tools, tomato cages, and the picnic table in the winter.

These will left behind as memories, too. Continue reading →

Permeated by Peace: In the Dalai Lama’s Presence, 1989

Posted on April 9, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

Dalai Lama 1991

A friend with connections told us to gather near a small gray door in the back of the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium before 7 a.m. After a guard turned the lock, we filed into an empty auditorium and sat in front row seats. On stage, the maroon and gold clad Dalai Lama sat with other monks, chanting and performing preparatory rituals for the afternoon Kalachakra teachings.

Each morning that week, Vic and I and about twenty friends waited for that door to open. The Dalai Lama had visited our meditation and study center in the Finger Lakes ten years earlier in 1979 and members of our group often traveled to see him when he visited the United States.

As we sat in silence, rhythmic scratching of metal against stone accompanied the insistent chanting. Scritch, scratch, scritch, scritch, scratch. A second group of monks kneeled on a platform, bending over their work, grating colored sticks of sandstone into a sand mandala—scratch, scritch, aum, aum. The pulsing chants and scratches took me deep and deeper into a cave of inner silence. Continue reading →

My Wedding Ring, My Lucky Charm

Posted on April 2, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

I took my wedding ring off on the first anniversary of my husband Vic’s death. The next morning, I put it back on. Vic dead. Me alive. Definitely still married.

I removed the ring a few months later and gave it a place of honor on my altar. Ok, I accept that I’m a widow. I hated the finality of the widow word and his body’s absence, but it was time to leave the ring behind.

And I did for a few days, until I felt naked without the reminder of Vic’s love and put it on again. At some point, I stopped wearing my wedding ring and left it on my altar within a grief bracelet that Lauren made for me. Giving up the ring for good was like having a last period. I wasn’t sure it was the last until long after it was over. Continue reading →

Tish Pearlman: An interview and poetry about Life and Death

Posted on March 26, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

Tish Pearlman

On Sunday afternoon, I went to the Saltonstall Foundation for the Arts to hear Tish Pearlman, the Poet Laureate of Tompkins County, read her work. Tish interviewed me for her award winning radio show Out of Bounds earlier in the week (links below). The interview was relaxed and intimate as she asked about the issues I hold dear—bereavement, writing, and my experiences of love and loss. After the interview, Tish mentioned that she had experienced her own death when things went terribly wrong at the end of heart surgery.

As Tish read on Sunday, her images helped me understand what I had witnessed from the outside when my husband Vic had twelve cardiac arrests one long night in 2007. Medical staff tried to push me out of the room, but I stood my ground to witness his vulnerability and the aggressive roughness used to save his life. Continue reading →

How I Learned to Trust a Man

Posted on March 19, 2013 by Elaine Mansfield

Baby Elaine with Grandpa Ware: 1947

Grandpa Ware smelled like cinnamon toast, steaming cow pies, and brown soap. His wrinkled cheeks were soft against my face if he had shaved or scratchy when he hadn’t. He covered his wispy white hair and sun baked face with a big straw hat. Outside, he wore tall rubber boots to foil chiggers as he made his way through the barnyard. Inside, he wore ancient scuffed leather slippers. His devoted mutt Poochie followed him everywhere, sleeping on Grandpa’s feet or padding behind him to the barn or garden.

I trusted Grandpa’s quiet raspy voice, his careful calloused hands, and his kind words that never hurt or scolded. He was the first in a long line of gentle men who taught me how to trust a man’s words and hands—my dad and Uncle Jim, my big brother, and later my husband Vic and our sons David and Anthony. Continue reading →