Bee Lavender

In the year before he died I was in correspondence with the previous owner of my house, and he promised to sell some of the contents back to us. I was specifically interested in the mannequins, the carnival lights, and the zebra mule.

When he died some friends were in charge of the estate and there was a brief window of opportunity to buy stuff before it went to auction, but I was in London and everything was chaotic. I heard rumors of the estate being broken up and distributed.

Later I tracked many of the items through auction houses, watching as objects that belong in the house moved around several states in the Northeast region. Many sold at astonishing prices; the previous owner had style and a good eye. I had given up hope to ever get anything back – I just wanted to know the items were safe.

But during my enforced rest time on the transplant ward a brilliant thing happened: laying flat on my incision, phone propped against the bars of the hospital bed, I was scrolling dismally through auction sites when I recognized a familiar marble face.

I had found many of the items, intact, together, and undervalued – albeit in Pennsylvania. With only a few minutes to the auction deadline I made several bids.

And won.

My surgical incisions were still taped shut when we drove down to pick up the mannequins, mirrors, lights, and Civil War autopsy table.

The house is happy to have them back again.

Morning light in my Brooklyn house.

In case you were curious, this is what a bed in an organ transplant ward looks like. From the perspective of a postoperative patient not allowed to sit up (or move at all) for 6 hours. Who? Me.

I invite you to use your imagination to fill in the details about the routines, the smells, the people dying in the beds on either side.

The nurses, orderlies, patients, family members, and even (most of) the doctors were amongst the kindest people I have ever met in my life. The quality of the care I received was extraordinary.

The suffering is beyond description, and the compassion on display is beyond imagining.

This experience has been illuminating, humbling, a correction. All of my concerns and interests seem trivial, compared to what is happening every day on the transplant ward. I wish my fellow travelers on the ward a safe journey.

I really do not want to come back here.

Live update from my biopsy. They won’t let me keep the core sample! But they did let me take pictures.

Nice words from Yuka Igarashi at Catapult about my essays.

You can read them here:

Modern Love

Space Oddity

Ashes to Ashes

Detail of Videbimus Lumen by Eugene Savage, 1934.

Butler Library, Columbia University.

Mary with her father, Bee, and Christopher, 1971.

Years have passed but I think about Mary every day. I hear her voice and I’m still arguing with her, in my mind and in my actions. Everything I’ve done, everywhere I’ve been, every critical choice I have made in life has been a repudiation of her choices. But without her, what am I? The depth of her addiction is reflected in the severity of my decisions, and how far I moved away from our home. 

Read more at Catapult: 

Ashes to Ashes

We’ve been married twenty years!

The party featured hundreds of people from every aspect of our lives, dancing until dawn. We were surprised and amazed at the turnout, and the outpouring of good wishes.

It is an honor and a privilege to know you all.

Some of the notes from the guest book.