Finding Magic Read online

  Dedication

  For Jon Meacham, who showed me the way,

  and as always for Quinn

  and forever for Ben

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Prologue

  Part One: Magic

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: Mystery

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Part Three: Meaning

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Epilogue

  Photos Section

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  THE SUMMER DAY

  Who made the world?

  Who made the swan, and the black bear?

  Who made the grasshopper?

  This grasshopper, I mean—

  the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

  the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

  who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—

  who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

  Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

  Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

  I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.

  I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

  into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

  how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

  which is what I have been doing all day.

  Tell me, what else should I have done?

  Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?

  Tell me, what is it you plan to do

  with your one wild and precious life?

  —Mary Oliver

  Recently I came upon this perfect Mary Oliver poem, which I felt spoke directly to me. Its questions were mine: “Who made the world?” Its admissions were mine: “I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.” Rereading the lines sparked hours of reflections—more moments of contemplation, more memories of people and places in my life that have stayed with me forever, memories of love and magic.

  I believe in magic, as I do in love. I always have. In certain ways, magic was my first religion, the one I was exposed to as a child and that has infused my days and imbued my life with meaning ever since. My own concept of magic was filled with mystery, no doubt influenced by my upbringing in the Deep South where I was surrounded by active ghosts and the practitioners of voodoo, occultism, astrology, palmistry, tarot cards, and psychic phenomena. Through the years, from those early childhood days of wonder to this very day, I have been redefining and expanding on the meaning of magic, and examining what I sought and what I found.

  Starting from a very early age, I thought of myself as someone who didn’t believe in God: I labeled myself an atheist as soon as I heard the word and understood what it meant. Most of that time I was not just an atheist but an angry atheist. At that point I never even equated God with love.

  Throughout these years of self-proclaimed atheism, I didn’t pick up on certain obvious clues that kept presenting themselves. I recall that one of my favorite cartoons pictured a young child asking his atheist father, “How do you know there’s no God?” The father replied definitively: “You’ll just have to take it on faith.” I knew enough to laugh at that, but somehow a possibly more important interpretation didn’t sink in.

  At that early stage, I was probably closer to being an agnostic (another word I didn’t know), but later I rejected that descriptor. I thought that any follower of religion was by definition an agnostic because we have no proof of the existence of God. Agnostics are doubters and skeptics because they have no real evidence to fall back on. My favorite bumper sticker, which nearly caused me to wreck my car the first time I saw it, has always been “I don’t know and you don’t either.”

  For decades, my dogmatic thinking kept me from recognizing how full of faith and love I really was. Ultimately, I discovered that I was never an atheist at all. I was actually a person of deep faith.

  Once I realized that neither label—atheist or agnostic—fit me, I had to figure out what faith really meant. I knew that my own version was sparked by a sense of mystery and inexplicable enchantment. There were episodes in my past that were extraordinarily vivid and mystical. The ability to recognize the sacred quality of these experiences helped define my own beliefs. New layers of life opened up to me when I stopped resisting.

  In the process of exploring my own concepts of faith and love, I realized I wanted to know more about how others—close to me and far away—experienced and lived their lives.

  In the beginning, I approached my subject strictly as a journalist. Or so I thought. I questioned the whole rationality of religion and faith and spirituality. How could all these people around the world believe things that made no sense to me? How could their beliefs inform their lives the way they did? What I didn’t realize then was that my interest was far more personal. I just wasn’t ready to acknowledge it.

  I eventually became aware, through studying, reading, talking, writing, and contemplating ideas I had never been exposed to, that most people (including me) were using some version of faith for the major issues they confront on a daily basis—love and loss, life and death, joy and despair, hope and spiritual challenges. Of course, we are all handling these questions in an infinite variety of very personal ways, bringing to bear our own backgrounds and embedded beliefs. For me magic includes faith and love.

  When I originally decided to write this book, my plan was to focus largely on the founding of On Faith and my reasons for developing it. I thought I would likely also write about a few stops along the way in my personal search. But when my husband, Ben Bradlee, the love of my life, died in 2014, and I began to internalize my grief and process his loss, that plan changed. Looking closely at and dealing with my pain gave me a new lens to survey some of the major events in my past and to see whether I could try to understand the meaning of my life—with Ben and without him. It was only then that I began writing this memoir. The spiritually overwhelming years just before Ben’s death as well as those since made writing this book a richer experience. The process surprised me in ways I never expected.

  This is not a how-to or a self-help book, although I hope that some of what I write about caregiving and loving may offer something useful to others. I would never presume to tell people how to live their lives. This is simply a book about what worked and didn’t work for me.

  Once I would have said that most of us are looking for answers. In my quest for meaning, understanding, wisdom, and a sense of the divine, I found that the questions were equally if not more important than the answers. Some believe that we have one life, and others believe that we have many. That’s simply one of the questions that arise in any discussion of faith. I happen to believe that there is a life after death. I don’t know what form it takes, but the thought of it gives me comfort. Certainly, I don’t know any more than anyone else, yet I believe it’s legitimate to explore all the possibilities.

  The stories I’ve focused on here were events and stages in my life when answers were elusive and questions abounded. It was
by continuing to ask questions that I moved along my path. Each story had a moment where meaning crept in, where there was some revelation, a flash of recognition of something consequential and illuminating. Often these epiphanies—fleeting as they may have been—were incredibly important to me, but I didn’t understand why at the time. Only in retrospect has their significance become clearer.

  I’m fascinated by memory, by what our minds store, by how and why we remember certain happenings and feelings but not others. How could my siblings and I remember things so differently? What was it about these stories that resonated with me, that made them somehow sacred? What did I learn from them? What questions drove me to ask about these episodes in my life? How did they contribute to my spirituality? What magic did I find there? What love did I feel there? What did Ben’s life mean to me? Myriad questions again . . . In many ways, the answers had always eluded me and only became clear during my ongoing spiritual quest. I have faith that if I keep embracing the questions, I’ll always be moving forward. As Rainer Maria Rilke suggested, “Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.”

  Looking back, I am astounded that I didn’t realize earlier how pervasive spiritual questions and issues are in our lives. They give structure, purpose, and meaning for how we love and live, doubt, mourn, and celebrate over time. I now know that love is at the heart of my spirituality.

  Everyone needs something or someone to believe in. It is simply part of the human condition. I feel sad that I didn’t see this sooner and didn’t take advantage of the opportunities for living an even fuller life. Because I didn’t identify myself as a person of a specific faith, I had the misguided notion that I was less open to any true spirituality. It never occurred to me that my childhood experience with magic was not disqualifying at all but would become the seed that grew into the faith I have today.

  Nobody can get inside another person’s mind or heart. Nobody can tell you what is going to make you feel better, what is going to assuage your grief, lessen your pain, add to your joy and exultations and your own sense of love and magic and meaning. For everyone faith and love are so personal. They’re related but intrinsically different. The challenge is to be receptive to the hidden wonders and mysteries of our everyday lives. You are the only one who can open those doors for yourself.

  I am writing this memoir in the hope that others will not make the same mistake I did, rejecting for all the wrong reasons an entire dimension—the unknowable and unseeable—that embraces important aspects of who we are. In my experience it is the invisible that can have the most powerful impact on who we become and how we live. There are such riches out there for each of us if only we can be brave enough to explore them. It’s not always easy. We need all the help we can get. I can’t imagine how empty and lost I would feel at this moment if I hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge the significance of what we cannot see, of the magic and love in our lives. It has been said—and seems appropriate—that “Faith is like a blind person looking for a black cat in a dark room and finding it.”

  Whether or not you consider yourself a spiritual person, I hope you won’t miss out on Mary Oliver’s core question that many people try to answer. “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

  Part One

  Magic

  And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

  —Roald Dahl, The Minpins

  Chapter 1

  Children see magic because they look for it.

  —Christopher Moore, Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal

  My belief in the occult started with my earliest memories in Savannah, Georgia, where my mother, Sara Bette Williams, was from and where I was born.

  Savannah is a magical place. I think it’s the moss. Moss hangs everywhere, pale gray and twisted, limp and slightly foreboding but mysterious and enticing at the same time. The romance of the moss cannot be exaggerated. There always seems to be a place to hide. It feels dangerous, and a sense of the occult permeates the atmosphere. One can believe anything when in Savannah. I’m not a graveyard lover, but there is nothing like the moss-draped Bonaventure Cemetery where some of my relatives are buried. It is the most deliciously spooky place I’ve ever been. I do believe in souls, and at times I actually felt them when I was visiting. They are just out there waiting to be admired.

  My mother’s family was from Statesboro, Georgia, about sixty miles inland. Mother had spent her summers there as a child, and we spent our summers there when my father, Bill Quinn, was off at war, first in Germany during World War II, then again before he returned from the Korean War.

  It was in Statesboro that my beliefs were formed. My mother was part of the McDougald clan, Scots who had immigrated to America in the eighteenth century and settled first in North Carolina then followed their kinsmen—and the lucrative turpentine trade—down to Statesboro, a small town on the way to Atlanta. The first McDougalds established a plantation outside of town in a tiny village called Adabelle after one of my ancestors.

  These Scots were mystics, believers in the magic of the stones, time travel, and psychic phenomena. My great-aunt Ruth was one of them. She embraced all those qualities and beliefs. Ruth was the grande dame of Statesboro, a pillar of the community despite her unfortunate marriage to a roving hustler named Roy Beaver. She was short with a round sweet face, apple cheeks, brown curly hair, and soft brown eyes, and she had a sympathetic smile with a slight overbite. She wore silk dresses with lace collars and pearls and sensible shoes. She looked exactly like what she was, the nice Presbyterian lady who played the organ in church every Sunday. She did not look like a woman steeped in occultism, which she also was. A wonderful storyteller, she knew all the family lore. Belief in magic and our Scottish heritage were woven into our lives in Statesboro.

  The McDougalds had bought a much larger plantation in Statesboro and had built a big house with columns right out of Gone with the Wind, where we visited Aunt Ruth. When I was little, the town had begun to grow up around the house as the family sold off more and more land until it was in the center of Statesboro. All the land that was left was several acres in the back that still held the old slave quarters, a tobacco barn, the stables, the corncrib, and some other outbuildings. It was a fabulous place to play hide-and-seek, and the kids had the run of the place.

  These were my happiest summers. Daddy was off at war, but I was so young that I hardly knew him. My mother was relaxed and happy with Ruth, and there was so much to do that we would fall into bed exhausted at night. My cousin Jane, her brother, Johnny, and my baby sister, Donna (two years younger), were all there too. We always had a gang of neighborhood kids looking for something to do. Our gang included Iwilla, the daughter of one of the household staff, whose name—I later learned—had been shortened from “IwillariseandmeetJesus.”

  The heat is what I remember most. It was oppressive, particularly the humidity, and of course there was no air-conditioning. I liked the particular torpor that it induced and a vague sense of the surreal that seemed to overcome all of us. Mornings we would get up and go to the icebox, get out a cold, green glass bottle of Coca-Cola and sit out on the back steps off the kitchen. I don’t remember wearing shoes all summer.

  Big ceiling fans whirred in all the rooms of the house and there were flyswatters everywhere, especially when we sat down at the dining room table for a country breakfast. Ham and grits and fried eggs and biscuits and redeye gravy were the staples. We’d rush to the table, laughing and giggling and talking. “Y’all want some moah grits,” Ruth would say, in her thick Georgia drawl as she circled the table.

  Suddenly, Roy Beaver would emerge from his bedroom dressed for the day in his three-piece white linen suit, his white shoes, carrying his white straw Panama hat. Silence would engulf the room as
Roy took his place at the head of the table. We were all scared to death of Roy. He looked like Big Daddy in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. He weighed at least three hundred pounds, if not closer to four hundred, and was never without a scowl on his red face, a handkerchief for wiping his forehead, and a thick smelly cigar in his mouth. Nobody spoke while he devoured his huge breakfast. We just waited until he finished and left for “work.” Nobody quite knew what Great-Uncle Roy did for a living, but he always carried a huge wad of money in his pocket. One thing we did know is that he owned a bunch of shanties on the other side of town where the “colored” people lived and he was always going over there in his big white Cadillac convertible to “collect the rent.”

  Roy was a bad man, and Ruth knew it too. She never looked at us directly while he was around. As soon as he had departed, though, the chatter and stories began and Ruth would say something like, “Did y’all heah the rattlin’ on the hall floah upstaiahs last night?” and then the stories began.

  We had a number of ghosts at the McDougald House. Family lore had it that whenever any one of the McDougalds died, a ghost would pull chains across the floor of the long upstairs hallway, which ran the length of the house from porch to porch as did the downstairs hallway. The rattling of the chains would keep everyone awake all night. Sometimes it would go on for nights at a time. The night my great-uncle Outland McDougald died, the noise from the rattling chains “like to have scared us all to kingdom come.”

  That summer when Daddy was away, my great-uncle Horace died and everyone in the house heard the chains making crashing noises up and down the halls. I heard them too. At least I think I heard them. There was a huge thunderstorm, with lightning crashing around us, and I got in bed with my mother. I could hear people sobbing and wailing all night until I finally fell asleep at dawn. The next morning Ruth showed us scratch marks on the floor in the upstairs hallway.

  As it was the Deep South in the early 1940s, all the domestic staff were black. Many of them were descendants of slaves who had worked the McDougald plantation. They were Baptists. They went to the church across town where they lived in the shanties that Uncle Roy owned. They were all Christians, just like Ruth, but they had another religion too. Just as Ruth was a devotee of Scottish mysticism, they were adherents of voodoo, which they practiced regularly.