Elul has caught me unwell and in a rotten mood.
This might not be ideal. The month before Rosh Hashanah is meant to be a time of reflection, of cheshbon hanefesh – an accounting of the soul. A time to look at the year behind you with some honesty before stepping into the next one, and it’s probably best not to open the books already convinced they are a mess. Well, I’ve had a look and, let’s put it this way, I owe quite a lot.
I haven’t tried hard enough. I haven’t always been a particularly good daughter, wife, or friend. I have been jealous. I have felt lonely while knowing perfectly well that I am loved. I cry about stupid things. I don’t appreciate what I have enough. There have been times when I have wanted to stop all the treatments and, well, just give up. And the list goes on …
By this point, cheshbon hanefesh was beginning to look less like soul-searching and more like an itemised list of reasons I’ve been a bit of a shite person. Which, I think, completely misses the point.
There’s this poem by Marge Piercy, ‘Coming Up On September’, that I’ve had on my mind while I’ve been doing this, or perhaps it was the inspiration in the first place. Who knows. Anyway, her September sits between two seasons and two years. Grapes are darkening, pears yellowing, the first red appearing in the Virginia creeper. There is ripeness, and there is rot.
Then she writes:
I will find there both ripeness and rot,
what I have done and undone,
what I must let go with the waning days
and what I must take in. With the last
tomatoes, we harvest the fruit of our lives.
I keep thinking about ‘what I have done and undone’, as I definitely have things to answer for.
When I am exhausted or frightened or simply in a bit of a foul mood, I can be short-tempered with the people I love. They sometimes (often, if I’m honest) bear the brunt of it, perhaps because they are close enough for me to stop holding everything in. There is an old grudge I have carried for far too long. I have said things badly. I have failed to apologise quickly enough. There are times when I could have been kinder. Still, looking at my list again, I begin to wonder whether everything on it is actually something I have to answer for. Jealousy, exempli gratia.
I am jealous of people who go to work, not because I particularly yearn for Monday morning meetings and an overflowing inbox, but because work means colleagues, conversation, problems that have nothing to do with lungs or treatments or failing bodies. I am jealous of people who travel. Of people going skiing or climbing or swimming. I am jealous of concerts I cannot go to and gatherings where everyone else gets to be together. Sometimes I am jealous of things as banal as somebody going for a stroll around the neighbourhood.
It isn’t an attractive feeling. I would rather be delighted on everyone else’s behalf and leave it at that. But I think there’s something simpler underneath a lot of my jealousy.
I miss my life.
That doesn’t give me licence to be unpleasant to people who still get to do the things I can’t. That part remains mine to deal with. But perhaps the first stab of envy isn’t quite the moral failure I had counted it as. Maybe there is more grief in my jealousy than I have been willing to admit to myself.
Ingratitude ended up on the list too. I don’t appreciate the small things enough. Except maybe I do?
I can become quite disproportionately excited by a new lily pad. I know which sparrows live in our garden. I love coffee outside in the morning and Pretzel settling into my lap. I love being held. I love it when a kid seeks me out because something has happened, and I am apparently the person who needs to hear the entire story. I appreciate these things enormously; they just aren’t enough. Greedily, I want more.
I want mountains. I want concerts and journeys and work and people. I want to go for a walk without wondering whether I have enough breath to get home again. I want moments in which my body is just the thing carrying me around, rather than the thing everything else has to revolve around.
The small things matter. They matter terribly, but gratitude alone does not make me full. Piercy sends her mind to ‘search backwards like the raven loosed / to see what can feed us’. I keep thinking about the raven, and I know what should feed me. I know where the food is, but I am still hungry.
And then there is the what-if I can’t seem to leave alone: what if I had tried harder? It brings me back to the line on my list I find hardest to look at:
I haven’t tried hard enough.
There is always something I could have done better. More exercise. More focus during breathing treatments. Better physio. One more effort on a day when I was exhausted or unmotivated. Perhaps I could have held on to more strength. Perhaps I would be in a better position now if I had been more disciplined.
Perhaps.
There is no parallel version of my life available for comparison. No me with perfect compliance, who did every treatment, exercised whenever she possibly could, never got fed up, never chose the sofa, never said ‘fuck it’ and did less than she could have done.
There are times when I could have tried harder. I know that. But I don’t know whether trying harder would have saved what I have lost. I know that too.
Piercy turns away from her ‘frantic white dance / over the jungle of productivity’ and allows herself to rest. I recognise something in that frantic dance: even being ill has become something I need to be good at, and apparently even dying lungs come with performance indicators.
Treatments completed. Check. Physio done. Check. Strength maintained. Symptoms managed. Resilience demonstrated. Check. Check. Check.
And sometimes I wonder whether there is actually any rest to be had.
All the same, there are things I want to do differently. I want to apologise sooner when I have been short-tempered. I want to tell people I love them more often. I want to ask for company instead of sitting alone wishing somebody would somehow read my mind and know that I need them. I want to put down the grudge I carry; it’s been taking up space for long enough.
Teshuvah is usually translated as repentance, but literally it means return. I prefer that. Repentance has me standing in a corner feeling properly terrible about myself. Return is more helpful. There are things I want to return to. I want more of the parts of my life that still feel like mine. I want to participate in things again. I want community. I want to write more, and paint more. Perhaps I want to return to myself, although I am less certain what that means these days.
But not everything I need is something I can return to. Piercy also asks herself what she must ‘take in’, and I think I find that harder. And there are things I know I need to get better at taking in:
Help, without immediately trying to repay it.
Love, without keeping accounts of whether I have earned it.
Rest, without treating it as failure.
Perhaps this is what my Elul accounting looks like, then. Not crossing things out too readily, and not leaving every accusation standing simply because guilt got there first.
There is ripeness, and there is rot.
And somewhere among all that there should be harvest too. I don’t know what the harvest of my life is. Just that right now it doesn’t feel as though I have harvested very much at all.
All I know is that there are things I regret. Things I want to repair. Things I want to keep. Things I want to return to. Things I want to take in. There are also things that perhaps never belonged in the accounts at all.
August said: not yet.
September asks: what now?