As soon as I registered that thought - why does sitting here feel like torture? - some other part of my brain replied duh Meagan. Doctor's offices are the site of your family trauma. They are the places where you had to digest countless pieces of bad news, or good news that turned bad within days, or simply sit next to Mike in miserable silence. There's nothing mysterious about having to remind yourself to breathe at the eye doctor's, even if nothing particularly scary is at stake.
I wonder how many hours we spent together with our attention focused on an exam room door, waiting for the doctor to finally come in? How many hours did we spend in obedient silence while a doctor swiveled away from us on his chair, clacking on a keyboard, pondering a screen? (Whoever would have guessed the extent to which the adoption of electronic medical records would dehumanize and, I think, re-paternalize the doctor-patient relationship? One is expected to sit quietly, not unlike a child at the dinner table who can only speak when spoken to, while the provider faces away from you, clicking and typing away indefinitely, occasionally asking a question about symptoms without actually making eye contact (let alone body contact). What can staring at a screen have to do with healing a hurting body? One is not supposed to acknowledge the strangeness of this bizarre social situation; one is supposed to be a good patient and submit to it. Mike would get so angry at me when I would bring up symptoms he thought weren't important, or dwell on something the doctor obviously didn't think mattered. I hated that. But now when I think back, probably some of the question-asking and forcing doctors to spend time on things that perhaps weren't essential was my way of wresting a little power back. Of insisting on making the relationship between Mike and me and our providers into something at least a little collaborative. Of forcing our experience, and Mike's body, into the room with that computer screen. See him. Mike is the only one who knows what's really happening in his body. We live with this terror day and night. See us.)
So anyway. The kids and I recently returned from a meandering trip to visit friends and family in three beautiful, water-rich locales: Massachusetts, the coast of Connecticut, and Rockaway Park in New York City. I was afraid to go. I was afraid of how sad I would be without Mike there with us. I was especially afraid of Madison, CT, where we all were together at the exact same time last year.
That was the hardest. Last year I spent the week - which includes my birthday - worried about Mike, who started running fevers again on day two at our friends' wonderful beach cottage, always a sign of disease returning. I couldn't find enough blankets to help him through the chills that began the fever cycle. We kept debating whether or not to leave early. He couldn't participate much because he was too sick and miserable. We ended up staying - the children were having the best time - but I was quietly distraught. Our friend Teb and I share a birthday, and Mike managed to be a part of that big, raucous, celebratory dinner with everyone: us, Teb and family, and Teb's parents. It was capped by a glorious ice cream cake. I was forty years old that day.
This year, it rained at the beach on my birthday. I spent the morning in a laundry mat. I hadn't slept well for about three nights and felt shaky. I retired upstairs in the afternoon, telling everyone I needed a rest, and spent hours on my twin bed while the oscillating fan slowly yet insistently shook its head no, no, no blowing back and forth across my bare legs, a novel open facedown on my belly, listening to the kids play downstairs, crying and crying. The sadness went on and on, as if I were suspended in some kind of terrible grief-jello inside of which time slowed to a near-stop, trapped by the pain of growing older without Mike and the clarity of memories from last year and the year before that too (Mike's doctor Owen called on the night of my 39th birthday to tell us Mike's relapse was confirmed by the biopsy he'd had the week before in New York; Mike was already asleep and I cried on the phone after we'd talked it all through, surprisingly myself by impulsively telling him in a spirit of feeble protest: but Owen, today is my birthday).
The tears didn't stop. I wasn't sure what to do after awhile. I heard the kids shush each other in the hall outside the door because Mama was sleeping. I heard life go on below, people coming and going, and I thought: this is what it's like to be on the outside of life. And also, this is what it's like to not know how to step back into life. Finally I did the only thing that made sense: I put on my bathing suit and walked downstairs, cried with my friends on the bottom step, and then walked around the corner and across the sand and into the bracing, seaweedy Long Island Sound. Stroke, stroke, kick in the cold water towards the horizon, until I felt like myself again.
That worked pretty well. The rest of the night was marvelous.
In Rockaway, on our last evening, the children were settled in various activities with our friends after a long hot day walking in Brooklyn. I wanted to get back into the ocean one last time, before we left in the morning, and no one wanted to come with me. So again I went by myself to the water (which is a few yards from our friends' airy, inviting home). The air was chilly and the wind was strong. The hair on my arms was standing on end. I sat in the sand, facing the water, hoping I'd warm up enough to brave the cold rough waves, whose mood seemed downright aggravated. Instead I watched a group of skinny boys leaping with increasing abandon from the now-vacant lifeguard's chair, and another family at the water's edge daring each other to get into the water (no one went in past their knees, despite one teenage girl's attempts at surprise pushes). An outageously beautiful, sunned, European-looking couple began making out a few yards to my right, past the leaping boys. Ryan stopped over to say hello on his way to surf before dinner. I watched his long, spare, wet-suited body paddling into the irritable waves.
I beheld the water, and the people around it, and I cried. I thought how drops of water make up those waves that seem to be alive, that seem to have distinctive moods, and how all those drops move across the earth, touching shores that I will never see, and many that I have.
Water, ever-moving, touches every place. Might it touch every time? As I sat shivering on the sand, those waves connected me to a hundred times and places spent with Mike.
In a Montenegrin coastal village, sunning ourselves by the deep blue Adriatic Sea, deciding it was - despite our initial aversion to the concrete block hotel and rough manners of the concierge and endlessly chatty British tourists we were supposed to sit beside during meals - a perfect place, and that we would have to find a way to invite all our favorite people to come for a blowout tenth wedding anniversary week to this sleepy beach town where, judging from the reaction of cafe and hotel workers, we seemed to be the first American tourists ever. The gorgeous deep waters, the crumbling Orthodox monasteries built into the green hillsides, the empty coastline - we loved it.
On a pedal boat, cycling our legs furiously in an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay, cursing the very idea that this would be fun on a steamy day, sweating inside our obligatory life jackets, Mike trying to convince red-cheeked Frances that she was "steering" our boat while I held baby Gabriel, who at that developmental moment was a terrible napper. We all agreed: the only good thing about that ill-conceived voyage at Quiet Waters park was the pleasure of seeing Gabriel fall asleep immediately, rocked by the gentle movements of the water, and stay asleep until the moment we returned to land.
On the bank of the Susquehanna River, elated at the midway point of the Tucquan's Glen trail, accompanied by our children and Teb and Diana's daughters Tessa and Annika, smiling at each other in amazement and gratitude at what Mike could do during that gorgeous, golden fall on a clinical trial that had very few side effects.
On a dock that jutted into a lake near Newpaltz, NY, where Mike and I, at 23 and 21, had decided to have a real vacation. We stayed at a bed and breakfast owned by a man named Doug who gave us an exhaustive tour of our colonial-era room, which included - memorably - him citing the year that the hinges on our door were made. We couldn't even look at each other during his humorless lecture, knowing we'd start laughing and not be able to stop. The next morning we went to a lake, and soon after we arrived a busload of middle schoolers from the Bronx did too. Mike and I were delighted by everything that weekend, including the kids, and I remember jumping off the dock, swimming out into the bright lake, and faintly hearing a girl sitting near Mike, who was still on the dock, remark: wow, she is really good at swimming. Yeah, he said, she is.
At the beach in Lewes, swimming near the shore in the Delaware Bay, watching Mike sitting in a folding chair and holding a squinty, sandy, not-so-sure-about-this-whole-beach-thing Beatrice on his lap beneath the shade of an umbrella. She was four months old. I felt impossibly free and happy, feeling the water gently holding me afloat, moving without encumbrance, seeing my husband and children on the shore, my niece and nephews, all of life enacted on the bright land while I watched from the cool sea.
Along the Mediterranean, midway through our month-long European honeymoon, on a hot and sweaty hike along the trail that connected the Cinque Terre villages, and then ending at the charming, quiet, rocky beach near the apartment we'd rented for a week, sliding into that inviting blue water together, grinning from ear to ear, not even needing to articulate the thought we knew we were both having: are we really here, swimming off the coast of Italy, surrounded by all this beauty, absolutely contented in body and spirit - can it be real?
And so much more water touched our lives: a North Carolina hike with all three kids that brought us to the most glorious waterfalls; a sad, irritable afternoon spent by the Carribean; crossing the waterways of Annapolis over and over, an exhiliaring afternoon in the frothing cold water of Soda Dam in New Mexico, a freezing dip in a lake outside the inn owned by my coworkers' parents in the Catskills, an unexpected summer plunge into the East River. All those scalding hot baths, the only place I could stand to be after Mike died.
I've spent my entire adult life with someone who was always quick to admit that he wasn't a strong swimmer - who was relatively indifferent to the lure of water - yet he put his toes in with me over and over again. He knew I always had to get in. He never grumbled about it.
What is water's allure about? More than any other element, it enlivens. It buoys. One rises and falls in the waves without a fight. You can float on its surface, suspended between air and sea. Its murky deeps stir up vague fears. The very sound of it triggers a nervous system down-shift.
Water, touching every place and every time, connects me to the becoming of myself, a woman who is indeed many things, but as this sorrow keeps spinning out I see that central among them is a person who grew up in relationship to, and defined against, and yearning for, and in conversation with, and more often than not completely absorbed by Mike Brogan, a man unlike any I have ever known.
Waves, tell me, who can I possibly be now that he no longer walks beside me?
