my life in books

I've often commented to friends that the only things I really missed from our packed-up house in Annapolis were the books. Books, and the beautiful L-shaped couch, our one and only truly adult purchase: a midcentury modern, marvelously firm, clothed in softly textured yellow fabric we chose from a box of alluring samples, sustainably made in America. exactly-the-way-I-wanted-it piece of furniture. A sturdy and expanisive object that could support all five members of our family flung lavishly across it at the very same time, books in hand. 

When I traveled to Annapolis on Tuesday morning, sitting in the cab of a big truck loaned to us by a sweet family at our kids' school and driven by our heroic friend Teb, I thought about how the couch wouldn't fit in the truck with everything else. And how we should leave it in the house for staging purposes anyway. That was okay; I'm not sure I'm ready to see the couch back in our daily lives again without Mike stretched out on it, reading. 

Then I thought about the books. So many books. There were boxes that friends had already packed from Mike's office at St. John's waiting in the garage. And shelves and shelves of them in the basement. Every time Mike and I moved over the course of our twenties, which was often, there unfolded an inevitable moment midway through in which we'd look at each other, sweating and staggering beneath yet another heavy box of books on the way to or from the truck, and wonder aloud: why do we have all these books again? Should we leave them all on the curb? Does it make sense to cart all these pieces of paper around with us from one apartment to the next?

We got rid of some of them. Sometimes. But most we couldn't part with.

So many friends met us at the house in Annapolis. They were waiting good-naturedly when we arrived with donuts and boxes and packing tape, ready to do the hard work of sorting and packing up our house to prepare it for sale. I hugged them all one by one in greeting, feeling my heart sink and trying my best to steel my buckle-prone spine in order to face the jumbled contents of the garage. There were coffee makers, dishes, Mike's bike, dressers, chairs, garden tools, the dress up box, random jars and baskets - all the stuff of a house that had been stopped midflow. When we had packed it all up in the summer of 2015, we thought that we'd be back in a year to resume use of these items - laundry soap, parchment paper, crafting feathers, swirled homemade crayons that Frances and Gabriel's babysitter had poured into madeleine molds, nestled in a red cardboard box. 

That was hard. We sorted it all in the driveway under a cloudy sky - this pile is trash, this pile is to be donated, this pile goes to the truck. It's violet and dandelion season in Annapolis. The cherry tree was its old blooming pink garish self, drooping overhead. My friends held my hands, they laughed with me over the odd bits and pieces all thrown together, a beaded necklace, a dirty potholder, a chipped vase. A lot went into their trunks, Goodwill-bound. 

It was only when I descended to the basement to go through the books that my heart began hurting too much, the spine-buckling commenced in earnest; it became hard to lift a box or respond to a simple request after that.

I had missed the children's books in particular, mostly because Beatrice was just two years old when we left and now she is five, and so many books occured to me that I wanted to read aloud to her in those intervening years. 

But I hadn't realized how our books tell our story. A quick glance at all those spines serves as an anchor to my own history: tiny tethers to the mysteries of time and space and relationship. I don't often reread, so I didn't miss the books for their contents. But in being reunited with them, I felt how each represents a moment in my life, and nearly all of those moments were somehow shared with Mike. 

There was Possession. I read it on a trip with Mike to Santa Fe in our early twenties, sitting in the bright afternoon sun outside our friends' home that they had generously loaned to us while he journaled or read a book about Buddhist-informed counseling. He had just finished the masters degree in his program and was already feeling skeptical about academia and continental philosophy; he was wondering about other career paths. We talked about it in a charming New Mexican coffee shop, and on an exhilarating hike that led us past a sweeping green caldera. On the trail we met a Native American drum maker who explained he had a special license to hunt there for skins to make his sacred drums. He offered us a look at a herd of gazelles through his binoculars. 

There was Shtetl, a book that I bought in a fit of luxurious expenditure just weeks after graduating from Swarthmore, feeling the thrill of setting my own intellectual agenda for the first time in ages, free from the social pressures of my sophisticated theory-besotted classmates. I wanted to read a book about the long lost world of the European Jewish shtetl. So I did. In our tiny one bedroom Brooklyn apartment, at the tender ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, Mike and I talked about the joy of reading exactly what you wanted to read - not for a class, not for an agenda, not for coolness, not to be able to reference it casually in certain company - but just because it was good.

I found the hardback copy of Austerlitz and held it up to Robert, who was dutifully hauling his tenth load of things up from the lower basement. You've read this one? 

Yep.

I didn't like it! It was so ... cold. But I think I was supposed to like it. It was supposed to be so good.

Robert said it was cold, and that he did like it. Also that it was much better in German. Then he kept hauling things, and I went back to standing there, rooted to the peeling linoleum in front of the washing machine, touching page after page. 

I brought that book home from Fresh Air. There were always books and CDs being given away, sent by eager publicists. Mike and I both read it eventually, and both felt sort of flat about it. Meh. I put it in the giveaway box. Even though it was a tiny part of our story, I gave it away. 

Each and every book had a story. So it was hard to part with any of them, though I certainly did - a lot of them. Children's books that I had read hundreds of times, favorites for a month or so, that I never really liked. But they had traveled with us, they had been a part of our lives. 

There were at least seven biographies of St. Francis, from a time when Mike felt particularly captivated by his story. I tried to remember the ones he had liked, and saved two. There were my dad's paperback copies of all the JD Salinger books that I adored - and did, in fact, reread many times over my adolescence and early adulthood - with yellow crumbling pages and that marvelous rotting paper smell. There were Mike's gardening books about native plants and organic vegetable gardening with pages marked and notes in the margins. There were stacks of Chesterton and CS Lewis, so important to Mike during his time of reconversion to the church when Frances was tiny, and all the beloved Virginia Woolf which made me flash to the debate we had about Septimus in our big bed in our first house in Lancaster, and Mike's suspicion that she was glorifying his suicide, which struck him as off-putting and perverse, and my defense  - she inhabited his battered mind so generously, so fully; writing him was an act of love that somehow excused it.

I found many, many journals. It would never occur to me to open one of them when Mike was alive, though he kept them in shared places, like living room bookshelves. I understood them to be mainly intellectual journals in which he would work out things like dissertation and lecture ideas, preferably in a pleasant caffeine-enhanced state of focus and flow, esconced in a quiet cafe corner. But on Tuesday I opened them all, desperate to hear his voice, desperate for him to talk to me. They were indeed personal, and searching. Mike's intellectual passions were so connected to his spiritual yearnings and psychological particularities; what did I expect? One journal from early 2002 described how irrationally angry he was at me, and how he knew it was rooted in his depression, and how he wasn't ready yet to seek help for his depression, and how terrible that was to endure. A couple of pages later he described the ways I helped him shake off that heaviness and anger for the afternoon, and how he loved me, and how he wanted to marry me. How he would marry me. 

Then I couldn't bear another page, and had to leave the basement for awhile.

There was a book of verse about Oxfordshire I had found in a used bookstore and given to Mike for his fortieth birthday, in preparation for our planned trip to England that never happened. There were so many Beverly Cleary books. There were the chunky board books that Mike read to all our babies. Peek a who? Peek a YOU!!

Nowadays I have these encounters with people that I don't know, and they are excruciating. At the dentist, the hygienist walked me back to the exam room, cheerfully asking over her shoulder how I've been.

my husband died my husband died

Oh...okay I guess. How are you?

On Monday, I took Frances out for some special just-the-two-of-us-time. We went to have our nails done. The gruff woman who did my pedicure picked up one of my feet and began slapping the sole of it roughly with the back of her hand. She squeezed the arch, digging in her thumbs while she looked out the window, and it hurt. My husband died! I wanted to yell at her. My husband died. How could you touch me with so little tenderness?

I think about him all the time. His having been here, and not being here now, is what frames all of my moments. The sorrow only grows heavier. Those books in the basement helped me know more deeply than ever that indeed, yes, I have lost the most important person; the person I grew into myself with; the person I trusted to love and love me; the person I could rage at one minute, and embrace the next; the person whose opinion I valued most; the person I wanted to make babies with; the person whose soul shined even in the darkest days; the person I once sat across the table from night after night, talking about what we were reading.

This morning at breakfast Beatrice mentioned the "Bob" books, simple rhyming books she reads at school. Gabriel remembered some of the first graders using them in his classroom last year. The two of them were laughing, listing all the silly titles they could remember. Gabriel suddenly paused, about to pour the milk into his cereal bowl, looking ponderous.

You know, Bob Has a Job is my personal favorite.

Something about the wry tone, the little sparkle in his eye, made me gasp. 

What a Mike thing to say; what a Mike way to be. 

landing gear

I went to yoga a couple of weeks ago, and towards the end of class wonderful Tracey the teacher invited us to choose a hip-opening pose that we were prepared to spend a few minutes in. I picked pigeon. Just the right pose for me: a tolerable amount of torment destined to tease apart all the hardened sorrow stored in my long-suffering hips. About a minute into the first side, she exhorted us not to neglect to give our "third eye a landing place," be it a block, the floor, or our hands. 

She didn't need to tell me. I was already face-down, rolling the smooth space between my eyebrows along the tendons and knuckles of my right hand which was resting on top of my left, back and forth, back and forth. I wasn't just landing my third eye, I was sliding it slowly but surely down into the earth - beneath my hands, beneath the floor of the studio, beneath the foundation of the building. 

In case yoga is a foreign language, or the third eye talk already has you rolling your first and second eyes simultaneously heavenward, I'll try to explain: settling into a hip opening pose is submitting to sustained, heightened sensation. It's a willing walk along the edge of what one can tolerate without quite heading into pain; it definitely involves discomfort. It's easy to forget to breath, to mistrust one's ability to sink a little deeper into the tightness and resistance without something essential snapping. But you can, and over time - if you remember to breathe - you do. 

But man, is it hard to dwell on the lip of hurting without the reassuring solidity of the floor, or wall, or any other strong and reliable surface. The persistent sensations can make you feel as if you are flailing about, even if you're perfectly still. Having something to rest upon, or push off of, as the case may be, gives one a sense of safety in the midst of all the intense feeling.

It reminds me of giving birth. With each kid, during the final pushing I favored a position on my side, gripping Mike or a midwife or whatever I could get my hands on. During Beatrice's birth I remember my top leg swinging into space, unmoored, futilely searching for solid ground up there in the air above my body. I couldn't become sufficiently calm and centered to focus on the business of pushing our baby out and trusting that I wouldn't split in two until the student midwife finally figured out (why couldn't I just ask? the words wouldn't form) that I absolutely needed her to grip the sole of my wandering foot and push back. Solidity, safety. Exhale. Then I could do it.

Now I move through my days looking for places to land. My third eye has rested on so many surfaces: the rough cross at church on Good Friday, the many strong shoulders and arms of friends, the floor at home, the floor of my office (the safest position of all, where I find myself when the grief is overpowering, is an extra ball-like child's pose, armed tucked underneath my shoulders, head pressing into the ground), the back of our firm yellow couch when I went to Annapolis on Tuesday to meet with a realtor and begin the process of sorting and packing up all the things that were frozen in time about three days before Mike's diagnosis, in 2015. The chain of the swings in the old backyard, the side of a kitchen cabinet, my open palms.

On Monday, before I went to Annapolis, I went to the Social Security office. I'd been putting it off. How I longed to put my forehead down on the shiny faux wood surface of worker's desk, reminiscent of terrible office furniture in the various non-profits of my past and visible beneath all the documentation I had brought, while she clacked away at her keyboard, expressionless. I had waited two hours for the pleasure of this interview.

Every so often she'd look up. Was he a veteran?

I would think. Was he? No. No, he wasn't. 

Four minutes of clacking ensued. I watched the reflection of the overhead fluorescent lighting's move on the surface of her desk as I moved my head ever so slightly this way and that, like a child playing with the sensory world. I looked down at Mike's death certificate resting lightly on the left side of the open manila folder I had brought it in, and our marriage certificate resting on the right. The children's birth certificates were tucked beneath that. There was my life, rendered strangely impersonal and official on these pieces of paper, and I sat on a black plastic chair looking at it and listening to a woman from the Dominican Republic being interviewed in Spanish for Social Security Disability benefits behind the partition to my right. I'm sure she was looking down at her own stack of transcendently joyful and grief-laden life events, all reduced to dates and names typed on yellowing paper. 

Railroad worker? Federal employee?

What? 

Um...No. No.

She nodded. More typing, more long minutes. My mind went back to the moments before Mike's death, as it often does, and I longed so desperately to be able to squeeze his hand, to look over at him sitting next to me and make mutually sympathetic eye contact - isn't this the worst? - or to find him waiting in the car so I could tell him later what a drag all of this is. 

Did he die in Lancaster County?

Think, Meagan. 

Yes.

Couldn't I just land my third eye for a brief moment? Just until the next question? I was entering the pain zone, past the edge of a hip opener, and all I needed was to anchor my increasingly unhinged body and soul against something solid in order to endure it. 

My dad always said never put your head on the bar. By the time he was advising me (probably around age seven, maybe when I dropped a sleepy head on a restaurant table) he was a long-sober alcoholic. Meagan, they'll kick you out the minute you put your head on the bar.  

Maybe it was a general warning from one person to another, both of whom knew that the other knew just how good it can feel to settle your forehead on a cool smooth surface, especially when life is getting you down. It's a comfort, but the world doesn't always look kindly on that kind of thing. So in the end I tucked my legs up tight like a chilly bird on a branch in the snow (how many times did Mike's doctor at Penn comment on how I looked like I was about to take flight, perched on the edge of the extra exam room chair during those long visits?) and wrapped my arms around my knees and somehow made it through. Now they will send us benefits for the children. I'm grateful. 

In writing this, I realize that more than anything I am longing for the very best place to touch down, which is Mike's body. Yes, there is comfort in landing my flail-prone limbs and heavy head somewhere steady when I am so full of hurt and sadness that I'm afraid the doors will all fall off their hinges with a crash. I find containment for this sorrow in a hug, a wall, an open car door. The hinges are, miraculously, functional. But I think when my third eye is seeking contact, I am really seeking Mike. His warm shoulder, his elegant jaw, refuges for me in the hardest of times, even when he could barely tolerate my touch because he was in pain and the sight of him had to suffice. I held his hand often during the days and hours leading up to his death; he was holding mine too.

My beloved. It has been a month. How terrible it is to be without him. 

o happy faults

O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!

O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!

I think about Mike all the time. I want to talk about him, tell about him, as do countless others who love him. Part of me worries that we will turn him into a tidier package than he was, a shining, simplified Mike-in-death who is somehow easier than my real, complicated, handsome, challenging, brilliant, sensitive, searching husband – a man who was many things, but never easy.

We went through times of great struggle in our relationship. We had young children, I was trying to balance our home life and my work, Mike had an endlessly demanding career at the college. It’s not easy raising a family. But it wasn’t just the usual pressures on us, it was us – Mike and me, in all our particularity, running up against a pattern of falling into alienation that took time and passion and commitment to work through each time we hit that wall. We would reconcile and come back together, until life would carry us along and tensions would build all over again.

Mike suffered periods of depression and would sometimes become more withdrawn and irritable, working too much; I would grow resentful and silent and take on too much of the child-raising and home-sustaining work. I longed for him to reach out to me with affection during those times of emotional and role-related distance. Often he didn’t. But neither did I. Eventually I’d get so angry that I couldn’t hold it in, and I’d overreact to a seemingly insignificant offense. We’d talk, and sometimes fight, and stay up too late, and eventually melt and forgive and get in bed and talk with open hearts, clearing the way – until it happened again.

I remember one of the worst times, when we were struggling to come back together again and it just wasn’t working. We were avoiding eye contact and hanging onto anger for at least twenty-four hours – much, much too long. I could barely function out in the world, carrying the wrongness of this separation from Mike around with me. Everything I did was colored by the pain of it. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was in line at Whole Foods with one of the kids. I felt my phone vibrate in my back pocket, took it out, and read Mike’s text: I can’t stand this any longer, it hurts too much. Please. I love you. Forgive me.

Or something like that. It was years ago. I do remember the phrase “I can’t stand this,” and how it articulated exactly what I was feeling: I too cannot stand this for another moment. I literally can barely stand up in this interminable line; the cart is the only thing between me and the scuffed linoleum floor. I cried and cried, right there in the line, and raced home to him.

It was only after Mike got sick, and we’d been through a couple of months of treatment, that I had a profound realization: I was not a passive victim in our relationship. I had sometimes chosen to see myself that way in the past, when Mike was depressed or overworked and withdrawn. But I was responsible for myself in our marriage, and when I chose resentment in silence, I was shirking my responsibility. I had been avoiding it because I was scared. Scared, I think, that Mike didn’t love me completely, and if I were to speak up when hurt or ask for more – if I were to claim full partnership – well, I might lose him. But the fear and insecurity were mine, about my own weird combination of temperament and a socialized commitment to niceness and conflict avoidance. When I stewed in silence, I wasn’t trusting Mike. I wasn’t trusting us.

Resting in private anger was cowardly, and not allowing our marriage to grow and stretch as it should. I felt shocked by this realization. I hadn’t been brave enough to be fully present. I hadn’t trusted Mike’s capacity to receive my feelings and stay connected. What an earth-shattering idea: I was withdrawn too. I wasn’t allowing my beloved in. We talked about it. I apologized. I began to see with new eyes, and felt a restless urgency about taking up my responsibility and being honest with him, as honest as I could.

Mike’s illness brought this to the fore for me because our time together was no longer something to take for granted. Not that I ever did, not really. My dad’s death from cancer at forty-four taught me that. But Mike’s disease and those early treatments made it so real: the situation brought my love for him into relief, and the glaring awareness that there was no time to fuck around – no time for dishonesty, mistrust, or alienation. I wanted to clear those things away, to be together completely. Not that I always accomplished it – old habits die hard – but I do think our marriage changed for the better. I’m grateful for that.

O happy fault. I’m sure Mike introduced me to the phrase many years ago, probably when he first began to read Thomas Aquinas seriously, though reading back over Mike’s two precious blog posts yesterday was a reminder of how fully he engaged his faith and love and intellect in an effort to understand how God can will terrible things. How evil and cancer and suffering can be part of God’s intention. O happy fault! proclaims that God brings ultimate good from evil; salvific faith from harrowing suffering. A sin can be necessary in order to bring about something far greater. This line is part of the Easter Vigil service, one of Mike’s (and Frances’s) very favorite liturgical moments of the year.

We didn’t go to the Vigil this year. Too late for my underslept five year old. Easter Sunday with its triumph and lilies and insistent joy was a draining endeavor for me, despite good friends visiting and holding me and the children up throughout the day. I simply felt exhausted, empty, and sad.

Though it isn’t exactly the same gesture, the same narrative, I associate O happy fault now with another shift that opened up for me in the last months and weeks of Mike’s life. This change in my heart was heightened during the two weeks he spent in the hospital before he died. All of our past struggles no longer pained me because I understood that they were the necessary sins of our greater love; because Mike was Mike, in all his brilliance and particularity and irreducible Mike-ness, and because I was me, we had to have those struggles. It was all part of our path, and thus precious.

I love the whole glorious person of Mike, and his vulnerabilities and challenges and past experiences are intimately tied up with his strengths, his faith, his soulful presence. Mike wouldn’t be Mike without the shadow side of his sensitivity, intelligence, empathy, love. I realized with surprise and gratitude that I held tenderly to the painful moments of our relationship alongside the joyful and romantic and transcendent ones. It no longer hurt to consider the hard times. We had to have them all, because we were us. Being us was a treasure.

I fell in love with Mike when I was twenty years old. We shared the rocky passage from late adolescence into adulthood. We had to find our way together, growing up, struggling with how to honor ourselves and each other and our love and God. That isn’t easy for any two people to do.

O happy faults – Mike’s faults, my faults, our fumbling mistakes, our failures to take up our responsibility to one another – because without them, we wouldn’t be us. We wouldn’t have grown into accepting and loving each other more deeply, as we did. Aeschylus says “wisdom comes alone through suffering.” We had to suffer to grow in wisdom.

Both before and after Mike’s illness I would often note how incredible it was that I could nurse hurt feelings and hang onto anger all day long, avoiding him as best I could, but as soon as we looked each other in the eye and spoke a few honest words – words that had to have love anchoring them, if they were indeed honest – it all melted away. It was almost annoying, how hard it was to stay mad at Mike. It was affirming too. No matter how messed up things were, it was all rooted in love and thus suffused with hope.

Loving him, I told Mike, wasn’t really up to me. It wasn’t something I willed. It just was. It was an insistent force, and even when I would have wished to turn it off, or at least turn down the intensity so that I could stay mad or separate in some way, I simply couldn’t.

So I don’t want to lose our faults. I don’t want to smooth over the difficulties, the sadness, the annoyance. I don’t want to edit the stories. I cherish all of it.

In the ICU one day Mike mouthed something that I didn’t understand. He wanted me to pass him the tissues or something simple like that, but I was and am a miserable lip reader. I apologized and passed him the iPad, asking him to type it for me. He refused, violently gesturing forget it with obvious irritation.

Be patient with me Mike, I said. Don’t treat me like that. This is hard for me too.

He looked at me, so depleted, and now upset with himself for being short. Which I could barely stand, adding to his burdens like that, though I had promised him – and myself – that I would be honest with him about my feelings even in those terrible times. I had to. I couldn’t bear any chasms, even small ones, to grow between us.

Are you angry with me about anything? I asked.

I thought he might cry. No, he said. You’re perfect. And then: I hate how intimacy erodes courtesy. I have always struggled with that.

Before Mike’s tracheostomy, I sat with him in the pre-op area, holding his hand and crying and saying goodbye to his perfect elegant throat. We both cried during those long quiet waiting minutes, on the cusp of a procedure that dramatically marked the transition from treatment to palliative care.

In the past, during our hardest moments, Mike had articulated a fear that he wasn’t the husband I deserved. That perhaps I wished for someone, or something, better. Suddenly, as we were waiting, I had to make sure he knew that that never was and never could be the case. So I told him, sitting in the plastic chair pulled up as close as it could be to the gurney, wedged between the IV pole and the nurse’s rolling computer, that he was the best husband in the world for me. I loved every part of him. I loved his whole being. I wanted for nothing. There is nowhere in the world I would rather have been than right there, at his side, holding his hand, sharing that grief.

I knew that was true, true as true as true. And so did he. The pains of our past had all slid away in those days, though I had not forgotten them. They were now simply part of who we were. Mike could drive me crazy. He could escape into a book of theology or philosophy and disappear for hours. He could make me laugh harder than anyone, he could never resist correcting my grammar, he could recite hip hop lyrics with surprising imitative skill, he could melt me with the graze of his hand on my shoulder. He loved and sought after God with a singlemindedness that I sometimes found exasperating, though it was the part of him that called to me most powerfully, and shaped so much of our great love.

He was the best husband in the world for me, and he died.

It hurts so much.