breathless

I dreamt last night that I was washing dishes alone in the kitchen. It was a mix of kitchens: the old Annapolis kitchen (our house is now on the market), my mother's kitchen, our current kitchen on Elm Street. All was quiet. Suddenly a healthy Mike came rushing in, moving with his old tightly-wound, quick physicality.

I had to take you to the hospital.

My hands were still in the soapy sink. You did?

I took you to the hospital Meagan, and you died. 

I was standing there, rooted, so worried about Mike. He was agitated and distraught, pacing while reporting this terrible thing that had happened. I wanted to reach out and comfort him. I wanted to hold him and tell him it was okay, just back up, slow down, explain what exactly happened to me at the hospital, I'm sure we can face this together. But I knew he was too upset for a hug; he had to keep moving. I just stood there looking at him with my wet hands hanging in the air, and he looked back at me, bewildered and searching. He seemed to be saying, how could you have just died like that?

That's all I remember from the dream. I woke up still inside of it, and it took me awhile to realize that no, I had taken Mike to the hospital. He was the one who had died.

The middle finger and thumb of my right hand reach many times a day for the place on my left hand where my wedding ring should be. I realize I'm looking for the ring when I notice my middle finger sliding back and forth along the bone, pushing against its firmness. Especially after we picked out a circle of tiny diamonds for our fifteenth wedding anniversary last year, which I wore settled closely on top of my wedding ring, I developed a habit of tugging the rings back and forth against each other. It was a comfort.

I asked Mike for those diamonds. He had to be convinced, though in the end he wondered if he shouldn't have advocated harder for a big rock, rather than agreeing to the more modest circlet I chose. A small, quiet part of me knew then that I needed something I would be allowed to wear after Mike died. It's on my right hand now. It scrapes without the heft of the wedding ring next to it, which surpassed its rough edges and clanked gently against the floor when I would settle, palms up, for savasana in yoga class. I don't slide it around now; I keep fingering the space where it should be instead.

Grasping the bone where my ring should be, my sleeping mind twisting reality in my dreams - every part of me searches for Mike. My waking mind cycles through memories: the intesity and fear and togetherness of the last days in the hospital, the quiet moments upstairs in our bedroom, hooking up his IV meds before I made dinner, kneeling on the ground at his feet while he sat in the orange chair, not saying anything at all and feeling so tenderly, listening to the kids downstairs. And my mind surprises me by offering up, amidst all the memories of our scary years with lymphoma, brilliant scenes from our past, especially our first weeks together.

I was sitting on the lawn at Swarthmore with Heather in the bright sunshine on one of the very first warm spring days. Mike was visiting that weekend; he had stopped in the library for something while we chatted at a distance outside. I was leaning back on my hands with my legs stretched out in front of me, newly bare and sensitive to the prickly green grass. Suddenly I looked up and saw Mike coming towards us. He was walking quickly, and when our eyes met he smiled and began to jog, with his elbows held close to his sides, hands high, and his thumbs jaunty and upright. He often ran like that: thumbs up. Two thumbs up. It was a little eccentricity, a way he moved that I always noticed and loved. Even at his most serious, his most existential and focused, this one part of him was resolutely sunny, gesturing to all who cared to look: everything's a-okay.

He was wearing a little white t-shirt, as he often did in those days. His summertime uniform. He and his tightly-wound temperament were relaxed and happy, which gave him a beautiful youthful bounce. He held my eyes, lightly jogging the entire way across that vast lawn, and the more I looked at him the more passionate unhinged love welled up in me, so big that I could barely stand to hold his gaze. I smiled crazily back at him until it all came out in a big laugh. Here he comes, this handsome golden bouncing boy, right to me! Heather groaned a bit. You guys.

I hold that vision of Mike on the lawn close. It reminds me of Gilead, when John Ames wonders what it will be like to inhabit a resurrected body. What age will he be when he rises again? He imagines himself as a young man, throwing and catching a baseball, feeling ease and grace and lightness in his limbs.

During those early days while I was still in school I wrote Mike an email with the subject 'breathless in beardsley.' Beardsley was the computer lab. We wrote each other often. (Where are those emails now? In an immaterial jumble, mixed up with all the other lost love letters that are drifting through cyberspace, I suppose.) I described for him how desperately I missed him, how I had sat down in the lab intending to write him a quick note and the anticipation of reaching out to him in that way had quickly mounted and left me feeling absolutely breathless. As if I were sipping air through a straw. I was dizzy and lightheaded and could barely breathe, I missed him so much. What was I doing in this dreary, fluroescent-lit computer lab without him?

I only remember it because Mike later mentioned how I had captured the moment just perfectly, how evocative that email was. He didn't articulate admiration often or give compliments easily. As Frances says, that's why you believed it when he told you something good about yourself. Nearly all of Mike's words of praise for me are seared in my mind. In the past it almost embarrassed me, how jealously I treasured them.

Maybe I keep remembering that time of ardent, impassioned love, that time of seeing only Mike - jogging across the lawn, walking down a Brooklyn street, sitting in a friend's living room, when barely anything else in my field of vision registered, because this time of piercing loss is like a matching bookend to our time on earth together. The end is like the beginning. I see Mike all the time now too. I look for him everywhere. All things point to him, relate to him, reveal him.

I am breathless again. When you're grieving, it's easy to forget to breathe.

Last weekend we went to the cemetery with friends who were visiting. It was overcast and the temperature seemed to be dropping by the minute; the quality of the air moving against us felt ominous. But the rain was holding off. Beatrice and her new friend Aydin were wandering, picking wild strawberries to put on Mike's grave, which is still covered in clumps of dirt. Frances sat on one side, and I sat on the other.

Whenever we first arrive at the cemetery, getting out of the car and walking up the grassy hill, I feel the loss of Mike so deeply - the strangeness and weight of it, the impossibility of it - that I fear my knees will buckle. I have to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. I have to remind myself to breathe. Eventually I settle in to the sadness and it's okay. There's always some crying. Sometimes the kids cry with me, sometimes they are simply quiet.

But on Sunday I hadn't felt the internal downshifting into sorrow, the settled sadness. I was still in the pain and shock stage. I gathered my knees tightly to my chest there on the ground and held myself together so I wouldn't break apart. I was aware of the children, of our friends, of the wind blowing against my face. I knew I was crying; I tried to keep it quiet. I closed my eyes, unable to be present to everyone else, and heard my mind pleading: Do you have him, God? Please say you have him.

I meant have him in the sense I would have used it at a party, or the pool, or after school, when it was almost time to leave and I needed to gather up our family: Mike, do you have Beatrice? Is she safe and secure with you? Are you keeping an eye on her? Can you assure me that she's okay, you won't let her go?

And just as this desperate prayer formed itself, I felt something cold and sharp suddenly hit my right knee, and then my left. I opened my eyes, startled. Was I crying cold tears? No - no. It was rain. But something about my own crying and praying and pain told me that God was crying too.

Maybe God was telling me he does indeed have Mike. Or maybe God was simply crying with me, sharing my sorrow. At the time the latter possibility seemed more salient. I didn't think about what happened next to Lazarus; I just held in my heart how Jesus wept.

A few moments later, Frances spotted an Eastern bluebird settling down near a grave a few yards away from us. An Eastern bluebird! That shook me free. I skirted around Mike's grave and sat with her. She pointed out others in the big tree towering above us. We never see Eastern bluebirds. A picture of one started Frances's birding obsession at the tender age of four. They were - and are - her very favorite bird. I made a cake in the shape of a bluebird for her sixth birthday. She taught us to see songbirds through her eyes then, and all of us gratefully adopted her sense of wonder and curiousity and admiration, though none of us ever matched her ability to identify them and their calls. Mike delighted in all of it.

If he were to send Frances a sign - a sign of hope and continuity and love - it might be an Eastern bluebird. We couldn't believe it. There was a family of them, taking shelter before the storm, right there next to Mike's grave.

Every time we go to the cemetery, we are devastated anew and we are nurtured afresh. Tears and bluebirds. I miss you, Mike.