“Hello, I’m Emmy Lu,” said a tiny woman with bright white hair cropped short and elegantly dressed in a sapphire blue cardigan the color of her eyes with a dangly sea glass necklace and earrings. “There’s a seat over there.” She motioned beyond where I stood in the coffee shop’s dim entryway to the wooden tables and chairs surrounding a smaller table that held a vase of peonies and a simple iron cross.
She led worship, glowing against the dark wood paneling on the walls. Her voice ebbed and flowed, a full river singing, as she asked us to confess aloud and then to rise and join hands for communion and again to pray for those in need.
Crone, Emmy Lu called herself. I imagined crow and crane together, the sleek dark strength of the crow married to the white smoke feathers of the crane, impossibly beautiful, impossible to hold. I fell in love with her immediately. She then 70; me 32.
That Wednesday evening was my fourth visit to the coffee shop church in Washington, D.C. The church was and is unconventional, founded on principles of social justice and dedicated to the idea that members would get to know each other deeply and work to “be church” to each other and in the world. People attended services in small communities that met in various places around DC.
Within a year of attending the church, I joined a small group Emmy Lu was part of that explored feminist theology. We sat in Rebecca’s living room with its plush floral sofa and green velvet chairs. A candle pooled light on the gleaming wooden coffee table. Wine glasses and cups of tea sat in front of us with small bowls of nuts and chocolates. After the hubbub of hellos and getting settled, we stood to open the circle.
By the earth that is her body,
by the air that is her breath,
by the fire of her great spirit,
by the living waters of her womb,
the circle is cast.
Then we shared one by one, putting out our joys, sorrows, hopes, and frustrations. There was no cross talk and no response when we were each done. Only the voice of one woman telling her story, opening herself to the rest of us, was fully heard. Not as part of a conversation, with the listeners readying their responses, but her story alone taken in. Each woman echoed back to herself more loved than when her words had gone out.
Emmy Lu spoke aloud into the circle to tell us how she had failed. Her stories changed over the years, as she accepted what had happened, wove new stories.
The guilt over leaving her young children years and years ago to follow a man to the Virgin Islands, who tempted her with the fine, expensive things she coveted and left her with nothing.
How much she loved her adult daughter and son and they loved her in return.
How greed had dogged her earlier life, made her follow that man to the Virgin Islands and others who promised wealth that never materialized.
How poverty shaped her into a woman who freely gave and graciously accepted the gifts that others offered.
How her almost violent relationship with the man she lived with for years bound her until she unknotted the ties and sent him away.
How often she was angry, irritable toward coworkers and friends.
I loved her for all of these stories, how righteousness was not in her wheelhouse. Honesty was. Authenticity. The spiral of learning, failing, learning again and better, failing less.
Still, I struggled with this intimacy. In my early thirties, I was a jigsaw puzzle put together haphazardly, pieces jammed in where they didn’t belong. Other pieces flung to the floor.
How much my mother had invested in raising us as a stay-at-home mom. My cousins marrying in their twenties, raising families, staying home.
How afraid I was, always the new girl, moving every two and a half years, standing in classroom doorways wearing thick glasses and an A-line dress so I would look less chubby.
How much I wanted my first kiss at 16 in an ice-green pool under a dark sky far above the suburban backyard. The next day he called to say I wasn't the kind of girl someone marries. Not the first or last time my appetite would be my shame.
How I wanted to escape the narrow rectangle I grew up in, find a place I belonged, home finally in DC, this city of transients, in a neighborhood that I knew was my place the first time I walked in it.
How everything with men was like walking in mud in the dark, slipping and dirty and wet and cold.
How I threw a metal vase at a man who was late for a date, how I slammed a glass door at my office so hard, I was surprised the glass didn’t shatter. How many times I flung my phone across the room again. How that anger shattered me.
How I drank red wine, dark enough to hide all the ways I wasn’t the person I wanted to be. How I wavered home from parties and bars, almost too drunk to remember where I lived.
Week after week, into months, then years, Emmy Lu’s stories knitted my jagged pieces together.
When a man I loved too much too fast broke up with me, she let me cry on her shoulder. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and brought back two cups of coffee and a plate of chocolate Milanos. “You’re too good for him. Don’t waste your time with men like him,” she said. I laughed. I almost believed her. She never stopped believing in me.
She took me to thrift stores when I began freelancing and had no money for new clothes. Our favorite event, though, was an annual rummage sale at an Episcopal church in the neighborhood next to ours. We got up early on that Saturday, filled our travel mugs with coffee, parked as close as possible to the church, and got in line behind the other bargain hunters. Once in, we hurried to what we wanted most, sometimes in the same direction, most often scattering. We met up here and there, showed off our loot, and took off again. After we checked out, I carried whatever was heavy to the sidewalk, and Emmy Lu brought the rest. Then she stood guard while I got the car.
How we loved reviewing what we found and congratulating the other on her finds.
“That scarf, Emmy Lu, is you, so you. And a working microwave. Amazing!”
“I can’t believe you found that black tulle skirt! You can wear it with those black boots you have.”
Incorporating past lives, histories into our own, loving them again, like the stories we told and retold in our circle rewove themselves into who we were becoming.
“Posture is everything,” she often told me. “Sit up straight. Stand up straight.” It was an almost too perfect metaphor for what I needed. The confidence took hold in my body even if my brain had no idea what the hell I was doing.
Emmy Lu was my wise woman in the forest, the true compass ever pointing inward to what I don’t know I know. I looked into mirrors to ask, “Who will I be when I am old?”
“If you are lucky, you will be just like Emmy Lu,” the mirrors whispered back.
This past July, I visited her at the Armed Forces Retirement Home just before her 100th birthday, August 4th, the same as President Obama’s, she often pointed out. She had moved recently to the assisted living wing, two floors down from the fifth-floor room she had lived in before, where she had loved looking out into the trees. “I don’t know why I need be here. I was fine in my old room,” she complained. “I don’t need someone to give me my pills.” But she was unsteady on her feet, scaring her daughter, me, all of us who loved her.
Her eyes lightened, still gleaming, still forceful, as I came in the door of her small room. It was cluttered with furniture, walls covered in paintings, some her own, and small modern quilts of brightly colored fish in the sea made by a friend. Photos lined up on shelves, the desk, bureau, and nightstand. A pot filled with deep purple shamrocks sat in the window, near a vase of Gerbera daisies.
She rose from the black desk chair she wheels around the room to avoid falling and reached out her arms. I hugged her gently, worried about her thin skin and bones like pencils beneath, light enough to lift her where I cannot follow, a day that is coming soon.
We took the elevator to the coffee station on the ground level where a machine made us cappuccinos then took them out to a patio, polka-dotted with sun amid the shade from bayleaf magnolias. She sat in a shady chair, I in a sunny one.
“I sang in the talent show here a few weeks ago. Did I tell you?” she asked. “I sang Here’s to Life.” She had a musical act for a while when she was in her 80s, performing as the Golden Miss M for retirement and nursing homes mostly but also in other places when friends requested. She sang songs from the 1920s, 30s, and 40s. Here’s to Life is her signature song.
“I bet you were a big hit,” I said.
“I wore the gold sequin top and my mother’s jeweled shoes, probably for the last time.” She showed them off to me every now and then, told me her mother had bought the shoes when she was old and living with Emmy Lu’s brother in Maryland, having moved from Minnesota after her husband died. “She loved to go shopping at Garfinkel’s,” Emmy Lu said. “When she saw those shoes, she bought them, even though she couldn’t really afford them.”
I don’t demur when she says “probably for the last time” as I have so often before, insisting that she is fine, just fine. At our women’s group Christmas dinner in January when we asked whether anyone was planning a birthday party for her, she said, “I don’t know if I will make it that long.”
“Of course, you’ll make it. It’s only seven months away,” I retorted, anger masking my dread at the thought of her death. Now I am not sure that my insistence that she is nowhere near death is doing either one of us a favor, especially her. It takes an effort to let go of the idea that she will always be here, always be my friend.
That day on the patio I said, “I hope you will. I can imagine living to a hundred if I were doing as well as you, but it must be hard. I know you must be tired.”
Then she sang the first few lines of Here’s To Life in her low, slightly raspy voice.
“No complaints and no regrets/I still believe in chasing dreams and placing bets/But I had to learn that all you give is all you get/So give it all you got.”
I wished she would keep singing so I could memorize her voice, her deeply wrinkled, deeply beautiful face. She is phosphorescent with grace. Like the ocean as we saw it, brilliant green against the night black sea, from a house on Assateague Island on a long ago weekend in early spring, running toward it laughing and saying look, look, look. Until we stood where dark water met sand, white foam lapping at our feet, until it was gone.
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