monkey business

This morning while hovering over my yoga mat, propped on my fingers, I proceeded to flop, scoot, and inch one leg out in front of me, descending into a rather inelegant, uncomfortable version of hanumanasana, which is fancy sanskrit talk for a split. I felt the weird nervy pinch in my hamstring that has been happening with discouraging regularity for the past year or so, making certain poses that used to be a comfort to fold into no longer accessible in the same way. Sliding into a close approximation of a split was something I used to do with relative ease and, I confess, not a little self-satisfaction. I may not know much, but at least I can do this. 

No longer! Maybe it will come back; maybe not. Maybe my forties will bring forth other party tricks I didn't even know I could do. Aging is so weird.

Anyway, I leaned over and wedged a block under my front thigh and tried to settle in. Not so much. I leaned over and found my blanket, fumbled with it for a minute, stacked that on top of my block, and tried again. As I fidgeted, everyone else in the class seemed to be breathing peacefully in hanumanasan stillness, and the teacher reminded us of the myth behind the pose: Hanuman is a Hindu monkey god, a symbol of great devotion, famous for his epic leaps performed in selfless service to Rama. In one story, he leaps from one island to another, all for love.

Then she said, four more deep breaths in this pose.

I started to cry.

Since Mike died the tears come in savasana with some regularity, but I rarely cry during the active part of a yoga class. Today, I noticed the sharp pain in the back of my thigh; my splayed, white fingers digging into the brick-colored mat on either side of my leg, attempting to relieve the burden of my thousand-pound hips; my spine trying to find length and then curling in on itself in exhausted defeat, and I knew I could not leap all the way from my island to Mike's island. I do not possess the courage and strength to make that single, graceful bound. I cannot bear the pain of it. I am no monkey goddess; my devotion falls short. I am an aging, imperfect human who used to be a wife and I need a stack of blocks just to tolerate four deep breaths in Hanuman's heroic pose.

It probably hurt Hanuman's legs to leap from one part of India to another. It probably hurt a lot. He may have had his own weird pinchy nerve pain. But he didn't dwell on it, because he was so focused on the object of his loving devotion.

I am afraid that I am not leaping towards Mike. Or rather I am afraid my leaps are heavy-footed, graceless; limited by my intolerance of pain, my distraction, my own self-pity. I am afraid they propel me no closer to my husband on his unknowable island. And I am afraid that if I don't reach for him, he will leave all over again. Cancer took him from me the first time. What if my failure to be a devoted widow takes him farther from me still?

I didn't know I was afraid of failing to hold Mike close until I started crying in hanumanasana.

Two days ago I found a box labeled "Mike's special items" in the basement. Since October, just after we moved, I had been attempting to look for that box, then panicking when I couldn't find it within minutes and abandoning the search, then trying again a week or two later. I felt sick whenever I considered that I didn't know where it was, but I felt sicker when I started looking for it. But then, miraculously, I found it over the weekend without even trying. I opened it on the kitchen table and there was his watch, his St. John's baseball cap, a handkerchief I had clumsily embroidered his initials on many years ago, his rosaries, his glasses. His glasses were smudged with oils from his hands and face. He was wearing them up until moments before he died and I had handled them very little since.

We had picked out those frames together while Frances and Gabriel waited patiently, slouched across a brown leather couch in an Annapolis optometrist's office, reading Harry Potter. I wasn't even pregnant with Beatrice yet. Mike wrung his hands over the expense. They were fancy. Danish. They looked fanstastic on him. I finally convinced him to elbow the frugal part of himself out of the way and just go for it. He was so handsome in them.

I took stock of those precious, intimate objects nestled together and I felt them all accuse me: you left us in a box. You didn't even know where we were. You haven't touched us in months! You are letting him slip away from you.

I put on his watch and put the rest of it back in the box and set it down next to my bed, uncertain how to honor these understandly angry treasures.

Long before he got sick, Mike was afraid that if tested, he would lack physical courage. He sometimes had nightmares about being in a foxhole, or a post-apocolyptic scene, or some kind of accident in which he needed superhuman strength and courage to save one of the kids. They were masculine anxiety dreams; murky, unconscious worries that he would falter when it came time to run inside a burning building.

But me, I worry more about my lack of spiritual courage. I'm afraid of God, or rather I'm afraid of looking too closely and discovering the frailty of my own heart before God. I'm afraid of the terribleness of my grief. I'm afraid of the pain inside. I'm afraid to take four deep breaths in hanumanasana.

Part of me knows I don't have to grasp and cling to Mike to keep his spirit with me. I've written here about how I learned that I needed to trust Mike's love for me when he lived on earth, and that I grew in that trust. Now I am being asked to trust my love for him and our love for each other. I suspect it isn't the kind of thing that will evaporate if I don't consciously revisit it, forcefully leaping towards the living Mike and our life together.  I suspect it isn't really up to me, in the end. Love just is, it can't be pushed and pulled, at least not with any peace.

I started going to an adult ballet class on Monday mornings. I hadn't taken a class since I was fifteen and was so nervous the first time I went, back in December. The teacher is wonderful. She is rather old and graceful. She dresses all in black, has beautiful posture, and wears her silver hair in a smooth, taut ponytail. I really want her to like me - or at least to tolerate my clumsiness and tendency to  grip the barre for dear life, the desperate tension evident in my wrists and knuckles as I try to get through a sequence of tondues. So when she approached yesterday before class got started and asked me about the chain of social connections that led me to her class, I basked in the attention. I explained who we had in common, how lucky it was that I'm off on Mondays, how I found my old slippers.

Everything is connected, she said.

Yes, I agreed.

She paused in thought, dropping her chin. Sometimes, she said, peering down at me over the tops of her black-framed glasses with a knowing look, it's unfortunate.

Is it ever. I bend my knees in a plie and my lower back hurts. I lie in corpse pose and cry. I see one of the children make a particular gesture and my knees buckle. Hanuman was trying to teach me today. Everything is connected. Sometimes it's unfortunate, because it's painful and awkward and imperfect and definitely not very pretty, and you think you can't tolerate it for one more breath. This contorted leap may be taking me, and the children, to new places, but it doesn't necessarily follow that we are leaving Mike in order to keep moving ahead. In fleeting moments, my heart knows that everything is connected, and love never ends.