(I should be clear about the circumstances facilitating these brushes with Biblical language, lest you think I am the kind of person who cozies up with a cup of tea and the five books of Moses on a Thursday night after our return from music lessons and the kitchen has been scrubbed clean, emails responded to, backpacks organized, and children tucked into their beds. No, after the kitchen is cleanish - a sad collection of glasses that didn't make it to the dishwasher are huddled together in the bottom of the sink and a pot or two is left "soaking," meaning I cannot bear to confront its cooked-on bits and am leaving it overnight for benevolent elves or more likely my fresher morning self to deal with, and I've said the final, dragged-out goodnights, long after ideal bedtimes have come and gone (Mike always asserted - in the face of bargaining and whining - that we don't negotiate with terrorists. But in his absence I do, Lord help me, I do), I favor the spell of Netflix while folding laundry, or scrolling through social media while feeling miserable and scratching behind one of the cat's ears, or going through old letters or emails or photos of Mike on the floor of my bedroom with tears in my eyes until I finally concede I am exhausted and crawl into bed. I put a Tessa Hadley novel on hold at my local libary a week ago, couldn't find the time or werewithal to pick it up, and realized this morning that I missed my chance. It has already slipped off the hold shelf and sunk back into the depths of the general collection. So I put it on hold again. That's what I call "reading" these days.)
Anyway. It was a metaphor from the famously hot and heavy Song of Songs, one of many illustrating the lover's face:
Your teeth like a flock of matched ewes
that have come up from the washing,
all of them alike,
and none has lost its young.
I laughed out loud. Oh, Mike. Read this one. It's crazy sexy. Your teeth, like sheep. Like dripping wet sheep who just had a bath. Bring those sheep-teeth on over here, baby.
Mike appreciated the weirdness of faith; he looked for the strangeness in Biblical language and loved it all the more for its unsettling phrasing. He liked to be caught unawares by an odd comparison or emphasis. He would have appreciated those lines. I would have read them out loud to him, or rather he would have read them to me; he read the New Yorker more thoroughly and promptly than I ever did.
But more even than the pleasure of imagining sharing the Song of Songs with Mike, I laughed - and cried a little too - because I love Mike's teeth. Yes, indeed! They are all alike, bright and square and strong, and though I would never have thought to compare them to a flock of ewes I would in fact compare them to a flock of something. A something that would never lose its young. A reliable, beautiful, consistent, precious something. I wish I could write an ode to Mike's teeth as extraordinary and strange as those lines in the Song of Songs.
I was talking to one of Mike's friends on the phone yesterday and sharing that I have been feeling at a loss at times with the kids; I fear I am letting them down on the parenting front. It isn't easy to know how best to support five, ten, and thirteen year old people when my time is more limited than I'd like, and they are facing the daunting developmental tasks of kindergarten, fifth grade, and middle school, of girlness and boyness, all while holding the burdens of sorrow and disorientation that necessarily come with losing their papa. I wish there was more of me to go around. I wish I knew what to do.
I wish Mike was here.
During his illness Mike often shared with me how powerless and sad he felt because he couldn't do normal dad things like pick up the kids at school, go to work, take them to a birthday party, have a game of catch. Once, around this time last year, after a long bedtime wrangle with Bea followed by fetching his medicine in the kitchen and filling his humidifier and finding more blankets I collapsed next to Mike in bed and he turned to me and said, it'll be so much easier for you. I knew he meant after he died. I told him nothing, nothing, nothing at all could possibly be easier without him. If he died, everything would be harder than I could bear.
Which was true.
When I don't know what to do about one of the kids, most of the time I can imagine what Mike would say. I can conjure his voice and sensibility. I can imagine the things he would do, based on our life before he was sick, and believe me, a little co-parenting would be AMAZING right now. I'd give my left arm to have one of those tense negotiations with Mike, splitting up pick-ups and drop-offs, deciding what to do with a scheduling conflict. Heck, I'd do anything for an early morning fight over who has to go into work late for a snow delay. Running a family is definitely way, way harder alone. But the difficulty lies not so much in the lack of a second driver who is also invested in soccer practice and piano lessons. The loss of Mike's insight and advice - excellent as they were - doesn't get to the heart of the thing either.
It's his being, not his doing, that I miss. The pain of his absence is what makes my knees buckle, and its really hard to get shit done when you're struggling to stand up.
Some of all this was part of that conversation with Mike's friend yesterday. It came up because he was being hard on himself for not doing enough when Mike was sick.
But you were there, I thought. You were with him. He was with you. If my experience of grief is teaching me anything, it is that the fact of one's being is the most precious thing of all. Our doings, in the end, aren't so very important. But it's hard to know that when death isn't pressing down on you.
I was pulled in so many directions when Mike was sick. There were so many concrete tasks to do. I don't get down on myself for being so busy then - I know it was just the nature of my path - but I do mourn the hours and hours I didn't stretch out next to him and listen to him think or sleep or cry and not say anything at all.
I don't need Mike to call one of the kids' teachers, or to tell me what to do in the face of some of the harder and more daunting parenting choices I need to make. He wouldn't know either. Who does, really? What I need is for him to be with me in the not-knowing.
How I long for his Mike-ness. His singularity. His teeth.
The elegant set of his jaw, which would become imperceptibly rigid when he was irritated. I would call him the Metal Man when that happened, a man with jaws of steel, which as you can imagine did nothing to melt the metal away.
His pale, surprisingly hairy, exquisitely unique feet. He called them his hooves. They were wide and short, with square toes and toenails. They were the utter opposite of my shockingly long, bony, brown feet. His hooves, my flippers. A ridiculous pairing of two pairs of feet.
His turn of phrase. His jokes. His surprising capacity to bust out the oldey timey hip hop moves, or a line memorized long before I met him, like basketball is my favorite sport/I like the way they dribble up and down the court, or both. His severity. His levity. His discernment, his psychological acuity, his comfort around children, his peacefulness in natural settings.
His clear eyes. I know that everyone, especially those we love best, has soul-window quality eyes, but it is possible that Mike Brogan's eyes were more extraordinary in this regard than most. They were steady and strong yet open and vulnerable, and possessed of a shifting air/water/sky color that I should not even attempt to describe. At our wedding Mike spoke his vows in a booming, unfaltering voice that I simply couldn't believe. How did he do that? When it was my turn I struggled to make any sound come out of my voice at all. Our priest was a little worried. But what I remember more than the sound of his voice is the look of his eyes, unafraid to meet mine, unafraid of anything at all, full of love and fidelity. A lifted eyebrow, a gaze that held mine, a subtle roll. Mike's eyes always said everything.
I know it's hard to believe, but I think if it is true for Mike, it's true for you, too.
Your weird habits, your limitations, the things you've done and the things you haven't done, the particular planes of your body, the way you sneeze - all of it amounts to a thousand things to love about you. How wonderful it is that you are.
1 comment:
And, of course, you, too, Beloved.
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