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Mike suffered periods of depression and would sometimes become more withdrawn and irritable, working too much; I would grow resentful and silent and take on too much of the child-raising and home-sustaining work.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.