Traveling with Pomegranates (26 page)

As I leave the chamber and move back through the tunnel of stones, I start to think about a winter visit I made to Thomas Merton’s monastery in Kentucky, the Abbey of Gethsemani, when I was in my thirties. A wife, mother, and writer caught in a profusion of busyness, I was full of excel-erating and accelerating, but still hopelessly drawn to Merton’s writings and the contemplative life. Merton had introduced me to what he called the True Self, referring to the God spark or divine nature in the human soul that’s described by practically every mystical tradition in the world. If we could glimpse it, he wrote, “we would see these billions of points of light coming together . . .” At the time, I had no idea what he was talking about.

During that visit, I walked for miles in the cold woods, considering the notion that beneath my ordinary self dwells a deep transcendent Self, a timeless and eternal part of me. Then, standing idly beside a woodpile, having given up on figuring it out, something at the core of me flared up. I recognized the truth of that eternal Self, as if I were remembering what had always existed in me, though that hardly seems to make sense. I was left with a new feeling about myself, about life: neither were quite what I thought. There was something immense going on.

My problem, as I would soon find out—and really
the
problem, as Merton pointed out—is that I was deeply attached to my “external self,” to my beloved and tenacious
I
. Even now, as I revisit all this, I want to retreat into an internal argument about what a necessary thing the ego is, how I need a well-developed sense of myself to bring forth my work in the world. And all that’s true, but why do I belabor the point to myself? Is it because I hate to think of the ways my
I
has grown entitled, selfish, and wounded, how sometimes it runs my personality like it’s the CEO of Everything, how prone I am to imagining that this external self is who I really am and all that I am?

In my fifties, I feel too enclosed within the walls of my small self
.

As this awareness comes to me, here in Gavrinis, I realize that the truest approach to death is, in fact, the gradual shift within from the external self to the True Self, loosening the hold of my ego and coming to identify with the billion lights within and all around—with what is larger than
I
. The thought brings me a deep, uncanny relief.

Outside, on the path to the ferry, I hurry to catch up with Ann. I stare at the back of her short black raincoat, her brimmed indigo hat, her profile as she turns her head. One day she will be in the world and I will not, and for a second the thought catches me off guard, but then fills me with such extravagant love I abruptly stop walking.

A tiny, green fern grows close to my feet, its tendrils fluttering in the air, and I am caught by a sensation close to joy, but not quite joy—what I feel is more powerful, more inflamed, that exultant wildness in the heart that comes with the dilation of life. It’s not the fern that stirs these sudden, expansive feelings, though I have never been more sure in my life that the plant, like everything on this earth, is a singular glory in its own right—rather, it’s that I am seeing the fern at all, seeing it as it should be seen.

How peculiar, yet obvious, that I would be invaded by the presence of
aliveness
.

On the ferry, I sit beside Ann, letting my hand rest on her gloved fingers. The wind slices sideways, making gashes on the water. The grayness comes down in sheets of brightness.

After dinner, in the hotel room, we are tucked in our twin beds, journals open on our laps. We nearly always end the day like this, revisiting our experiences, holding them up like prisms, writing them down, telling them to one another. I love this part of traveling with Ann as much as anything—the quiet pajama party.

Tonight, though, she is subdued. I think she’s worried about me. Practically every morning since we arrived in Paris, she has hovered nearby as I took my blood pressure, then quizzed me about the reading. Twice today she asked me if I was okay. And why wouldn’t she ask? I spent most of the afternoon aloof, preoccupied, noticeably glum.

My heaviness, though, has given way to a feeling of lightness. The aliveness, that sense of inhabiting the moment that invaded me after being inside the burial chamber, has not entirely faded. Common moments still have all this poignancy about them. I am not sad. I am—
what
? I read the last two lines I wrote in my journal:
I feel tender. Life feels tender
. I struggle to express what I sense: the way to leave my small self is through a simple return to love. . . . Readiness for dying arrives by attending the smallest moment and finding the eternal inside of it.

“You’re so quiet,” I say.

She stops writing. Her eyes drift to the blood pressure machine on the bedside table. A miffed-looking frown gathers on her face. “Is there something you’re not telling me?”

“What? Oh, no, it’s not like that.”

“But you seem
really
worried about yourself. I just wondered . . .” She drops back against the pillows as her voice trails off.

“Look, I’m okay, I promise. I’m not hiding anything. Sometimes when I get a high reading, I get anxious about it. I start to obsess that I won’t be able to get it under control. But, honestly, I believe it’ll be fine.”

She regards me for a moment. “You were freaked out by Gavrinis, weren’t you?”

“Freaked out? No—” I protest, then stop. “Okay, a little . . . The thing is—I’m moving into the last third or fourth of my life, and I’ve started thinking I won’t be here forever. It comes with getting to this place in life, I guess.”

I take in her face, the hot, bright look in her eyes.

“What happened in the tumulus,” I say, “was that I tried to come to terms with it—accept that death is part of life. It sounds grim, but it was actually a good thing.”

I try to explain to her that I re-found my faith in the part of us that goes on, and maybe even more in the part that is right here.

She comes over, curls up beside me on the bed, and lays her head in my lap. “I like you being right here,” she says, her voice drifting into sleep.

The caretaker at the Garden of Venus de Quinipily, near Baud, is an elderly Frenchwoman with cinnamon-colored hair. She greets us at the garden entrance, jubilantly waving brochures as if we’re the first tour group to come through here in ages.

On the bus, driving through rural Brittany, it took me ten entire minutes to locate Baud on my Michelin map. Out-of-the-way is not the word for this garden. Obscure, maybe. Secluded. Unheard-of. But there’s a Venus inside, a Goddess statue with a history.

“Bonjour, mesdames,” the caretaker cries, then her eyes light on me, and she adds, “Bonjour, mademoiselle.”

I rub my thumb over my engagement ring and think,
Not for long
. In eight months, I’ll be a Mrs., a madame. People will call me
Mrs
. Taylor. I think of Scott back home. We haven’t really been apart since we were engaged.

On the bus, I wrote him a postcard, then practiced writing my soon-to-be new name on a page in the back of my travel journal, experimenting with different possibilities:

I felt ten years old doing this, as if I were writing my first name in imperfect cursive and attaching the last name of my fourth-grade crush. Except back then there was only one imaginable choice, the one in which you drop Kidd completely and become Ann Whatever-His-Name-Is.

The name issue has weighed on me. For weeks I’ve gone back and forth about it. But not until the caretaker called me mademoiselle did it dawn on me that the way I’m addressed will change, too.

Scott will go on being Mr., while I’ll go from Miss to Mrs.—a new classification. How is it that he is addressed according to his gender and I am addressed according to my marital status? Well, that’s unfair, and now that I’m looking at becoming Mrs. Taylor, it feels personal. Which, of course, is why Ms. came into practice, to give a woman an alternative to being recognized by her marital status, and thereby known as herself. How do I want to be known?

I wish it didn’t matter so much to me. I tell myself I’m being nitpicky. It’s just another technical hoop women jump through when they marry. I should just accept that this is the way the world is. Except . . . that’s not how I feel. It’s not a small thing to give up your name, change it, hyphenate it.

“Ann.” Hearing my name, I look up to see Mom gazing back at me from the end of the pebble walkway. Even the caretaker is over her excitement and walking back to her little house.