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.