Tears in a Pale Apartment

If you were looking for symbols, Easter was a glorious day of rebirth.

Sunlight scatters gold on the ocean and emeralds on the hillsides, turning L.A. into a gleaming panorama of high color and clean air.

That’s what Easter is supposed to be, a surge of renewal from the darkness of winter, a resurrection of the spirit on a day as bright as heaven.

I saw Easter in children dancing on a morning lawn, the ebullience of their youth captured in a blur of laughter, their dance an unstructured gift to spring.

Their names are Nicole, Shana and Travis.

The ritual of egg-hunting over, they had become swept up in a rhythm only the young can hear, leaping and whirling gazelle-like under a canopy of glowing blue.

Their laughter was as clean as wind chimes in a sudden breeze.

I see them even now as clouds gather on a Monday morning, their heads thrown back and their arms outstretched, calling on me to watch as they move to the music in their heads.

The memory is a sustaining one . . . but darker thoughts intrude.

Life, I keep remembering, is not all children dancing on the lawn or sunlight on green hillsides. Tears too often streak the face of the city I write about.

There is sorrow, guilt and loneliness in this population bowl of 9 million, and no one knows that better than a journalist.

Consider the case of Carolyn Lappin, who weeps for the past.

She telephoned one day to say she couldn’t stop grieving for a mother who died eight years ago. Guilt and loneliness were eating her alive.

“It isn’t just that,” she said. “Nothing is the same anymore. Music is different than it was. Movies are different. The world is changing without me in it.”

Her mother had been a close companion, but when she was dying of emphysema, Carolyn, now in her forties, couldn’t stand the thought of her death and ran from her.

“I didn’t even say goodby,” she said that day over the telephone. “And now”--her voice broke--”I can’t stop crying.”

I can’t be everyone’s therapist. I’m not going to sponge up everyone’s grief. But there was something compelling here.

Carolyn became a metaphor for a woman I once saw crying at a bus stop, and for a man with tears in his eyes watching boys play baseball in a park.

They were people in grief I didn’t write about but can’t forget. Through Carolyn, my own atonement seemed at hand.

I stopped by to hear her story, and in a way I wish I hadn’t. Sorrow has a way of embracing all within reach.

Her small apartment overlooking Santa Monica Bay is a study in flat white: white sofas, white carpets, white walls, white lampshades. Large mirrors double the whiteness and create an illusion of disquieting emptiness.

With light hair and pale skin, Carolyn Lappin is an integral part of that bleak and lonely motif.

Once an aspiring actress (“I always wanted to be someone else”), she gave it up when a relationship with a man fell apart and she moved in with her mother.

When her mother died, everything fell apart.

“She had become my whole life,” Carolyn says, sitting by a window that looks north toward the Santa Monica Mountains. Anguish lines her face.

“Without my boyfriend and my mother, I feel an overwhelming loneliness. There is no one to know where I am, or where I’ve been. I could drive forever and who would care?”

Carolyn recalls with vivid clarity the day her mother told her of her illness.

“A Santa Ana was blowing,” she says. “The sky was pale. It was quiet and very strange . . .”

They had done everything together. They had cooked together, walked on the beach together, traveled together and confided in each other.

But when her mother fell ill, Carolyn couldn’t take it. She refused requests even to visit her in the hospital.

She doesn’t know why. A psychotherapist, Michael Aharoni, says she was a witness to her own mortality, and it terrified her.

Her mother was in a coma the last six months of her life. Crushed by guilt, Carolyn finally rushed to her side.

“I begged her forgiveness,” she says, “but I don’t even know if she heard me. Now she’s gone and never coming back.”

“What do you want of me?” I asked.

“Just mention her name,” Carolyn said. “Just put her in your column.”

If recognition can lessen grief and quiet the hounds of guilt, so be it. Her name was Nettie Lappin.

Now, perhaps, Carolyn can get back to living, and I can relax on a day dark with rain clouds and remember three small children dancing in the golden sunlight of Easter.