Sown

I’m sitting with my new and old heart. Feeling into what has lived within me before, and what is newly arriving here. Now.

Now is not really now.

It is the presence of love’s uprising of remembrance. Uprooting and growing new roots inside of me. Tools planted long ago.

I remember hearing the beauty of a teaching: generations that planted seeds for a tree to grow so that there would be shade for their great-grandchildren and their great-grandchildren to sit beneath. I remember being awestruck by this extraordinary gesture.

As I sit in some of the quiet I continue to cultivate, I recognize this is the legacy my beloved grandmother has grown inside of me. Roots that help my find my way. Offer me navigation. Stewardship. Companionship. Compassion. Mercy. Tenderness. Forgiveness. Spaciousness.

Humor. Openness. Light. Optimism. Clarity. Purpose. 

Nourishment in forms I had not recognized before.

Self-forgiveness for my own mistakes.

I look out at the world through her eyes which often become my own, and I see that I don’t know the difference between a full generation that I do not witness until it is reflected beneath the tree she planted. Until the day I go and lay my body beneath her. Until I see the colors that continue to change radically and regularly. And become soft next to her silken skin inside those crevices. 

I look in the mirror now and see her face and hear the sound of her voice. And then I feel my belly soften and laugh. Laugh sweetly and then loud. Loud because I have missed something and then suddenly caught it. Just the way she did. A sign of my elder. Of lost years never to be found yet captured somewhere else in the lives of others. In other places across the world. In other homes. In other bellies. In other beds. In other urns. Yet, still in a heart that holds love as remembrance, and as a bearer of light. 

A sound that was once embattled inside my belly now carries me. The very same sound of yesterday is now. Now. Now is a rush of countless nows. Boundless countless beautiful nows. 

Beautiful belly countless rushing nows of love.

My grandmother was wise to sow those seeds. 

I am carried. God chose a good one to plant them. It may have taken a long time for me to find where they grew. I now know how lucky I am. To hold what has been forgotten. To hold what can be remembered. To stay. To stay open. To listen. To listen to love. To love. To be loved. Now. 

Carried by love. 

12.1.2024

Jill Bacharach

I am... my father's daughter

I am alive now longer than I had a father living on earth: I was 21 when he told me he was ill and I was 27 when I lost him. He has now been gone for 29 years.

I spent most of my first 20 years not knowing much about who he was but when I learned that he was sick (and about the greater depths and shock of his illness) I knew I was at a crossroads. 

I was accustomed to my biological father’s many expressions of leaving. But this time, he could leave the world forever and die, with me never knowing him and I knew that would be on me. 

Or, I figured something else could happen: we could do some really challenging things and maybe, quite possibly, we could spend the rest of our lives loving each other and at peace knowing we had fought for each other. 

It was a truly hard won battle - 

Oftentimes a battle of wills, misunderstandings, heartbreaks,  

difficult personalities (including my own), and a brutal illness that kept taking more and more of a life away from a man I was just beginning the process of knowing, holding close, and finding the courage to love even closer.  

His long illness gave us the chance to say everything: the very worst of things. A chance to hear them, hold them, stay with them, heal them.

To say hello, humble human to humble human.

And most significantly, a chance to say goodbye without regret.

I suppose now that I look back and through and waaaaaay in, his illness gave me a relationship. An adult relationship. Not a nagging inequitable relationship. A relationship filled with ruthless respect that blew away the borders of others who had no right to infringe. A relationship that required so much of us, of each other and all we were unable to give when we chose intolerance and willfulness and anger and pride but were finally able to continuously choose to be brave and uncover what was beneath those things and choose better. 

I love him now without insistence. Without expectation. Without longing. Without sorrow. Without regret. It is a hopeful and regenerative love.

In the end, mercy met grace. That has been the legacy that lived through him and us in ways that opened in me these 29 last years. 

And I when I close my eyes, I feel that meeting ruthlessly, softly, warmly, compassionately continuing on.  

Dr. John H. Bacharach 1.31.1931- 7.1.1995

29 years later 

July 1, 2024  

I am 

My father's daughter

Jill Bacharach