And the books. Boxes upon boxes, stacks upon stacks. Mike's office on campus, his home office, and years of acquisitive impulses that went unchecked in used bookstores everywhere we lived were spread before me. It was impossible to walk in the room where I kept directing the movers to deposit them all.
The more I unpack, the more there seems to be, sliding in small hills and stacks all over the floor, and tucked in between them are Mike's notebooks. He nearly always kept an intellectual journal, which sometimes served as a personal spiritual journal too. Rather, his philosophical passions seemed to be expressions that sprang from a bottomless well of spiritual yearning. Mike journaled to work out things like his intellectual development in relationship to figures in Continental philosophy, the nature of his belief in God, what exactly Thomas Aquinas was getting at in a particular subsection of the Summa Theologia. In another time and place he'd have made an exquisite Talmudic scholar. He had a restlessness for the truth that propelled him through stacks of notebooks. The very slant of his handwriting suggests urgency.
And now I have them all. So I shelve three books, and then I open a notebook, scanning for something personal, something about me. Did I figure in his imagination? Did our daily life together touch any part of his thinking life? There are a few passing references, but not much. Flipping through the notebooks stirs up feelings about a pattern in our relationship that at times left me feeling uncomfortably like a demanding child. I'd look to him for recognition; he'd look to his books.
So I'm feeling all those feelings. And I'm finding the book of Emily Dickinson poems I gave him, and the Lorrie Moore short stories we both loved, and the set of Narnia books my grandfather gave me in the second grade that Mike read aloud to Frances and then Gabriel. And then another peek in a notebook. Still obsessively single-minded about the nature of God, the universe, and your relationship to it all? Yep. Okay, just checking. And then back to the books, taking a few to the front porch for passersby to take, setting some aside to move to the children's bedrooms, picking them up, putting them down again, tripping over a pile, stroking a cat's ears, picking up another notebook - basically making little to no progress at all and spending the last moments of the portion of my day off from work while the children were still at school doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.
Then they came home. I told them to quickly get themselves a snack, not even looking up from a Thomas Merton book that Mike had penciled notes in, because it was almost time to go.
Oh no Mama. Don't make us. We won't do it. Why, why?
Because we're just going to try it, I mumbled, still picking up and putting down books in piles at my feet.
But a support group?? We already have a support group. It's called all our friends and family. Everyone who loves us. AND SUPPORTS US!
Well, this is different. And it's just an assessment, to learn more about the group and for the people who run the group to learn more about you. We're going to see what it's like.
And so I gathered my groaning children into the car to be assessed for the Coping Kids and Teens bereavement support group at the Pathways Center for Grief and Loss that is housed in the same buidling as the inpatient hospice that we made plans to transport Mike to the very morning that he died.
We were ushered into a library space to wait for the counselors and encouraged to peruse and if we wanted, check out one of the books. The impersonal "peaceful" music playing, the hum of the air conditioning, the quiet halls, the tasteful furniture - the combined effect set the four of us on edge. Of course I tried not to show it. Each child reluctantly took a turn speaking privately with a counselor and so I spent over an hour and a half in the library, glancing over all those spines and the neat labels below each section: Children's - Religious, Loss of a Pet, Illness and Loss, Caregiving and Grief.
This was not my library. These were not my books. I was afflicted by the strangest sense of disorientation. What the hell was I doing in this hushed room full of books with titles like Planet Widow while my children were being evaluated for placement in a bereavement support group? Did Mike die or something? Did any of this 'nice nice' stuff, as Gabriel might call it, have anything to do with me, with my family, with my reality? Whose idea was it to come here anyway?
While Mike was sick, he and I sometimes acknowledged - no, confessed - how uninterested we were in fundraising efforts like Relay for Life, encouraging friends to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, or identifying in any way as a cancer patient. What did that even mean? We suspected it was pride getting in our way. Mike's disease was rare, our experience was unusual - our situation was different. How could the word cancer somehow communicate something essential about Mike or our family? We didn't want cancer support groups, or to hear other people's stories about their uncle's triumphant ten year battle with colon cancer, or to read books about how to help kids cope with cancer. We just wanted to muscle through it in our own way.
Was that hubris? I don't know. Would Mike be on the kids' side (and truth be told, my own private, fearful side) with the whole grief support group thing? I don't know that either. Probably not. He'd want them to know they weren't alone. He'd want them to be given the space to mourn in their own way, apart from the pressures of school and family and incredibly stressful house-moving. I know that.
Sometimes when I find myself and the children in social situations that are stretching our limits (and that I, of course, have pushed us into), I let Mike's spirit come to me. I can almost hear him say, as he so often did in life: Meagan. Let's get the rock out of here. And that's how I know it's fine to leave. It's fine to walk right out of Vacation Bible School with Beatrice, six minutes after signing her up. It's fine to leave a party early. It's fine to get ready for and then decide against attending a school function. I don't always do it, but I know I can, thanks to Mike.
Mike didn't suggest we split while I was waiting in that grief library. I noticed. I'm not sure if we'll do the group yet, but I think I'm glad we went today.
It's good to try. And it's good to know you can leave.
And it's really good to come home to your books. All of them.
2 comments:
And the books....all of them.....will be waiting right there for you when you want to open them up and check them out either again or for the first time. That is why writing...theirs AND yours...is so important. So the words that inspire us can be "set aside" for the time when they are wanted and even needed by us or by others.
So true, Mary Cae. Meagan, your description of the hospice library is apt. Your home library can't be beat. So glad you survived this giant move with grace and energy to delight in small things.
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