private eyes

I wonder if the appeal of the grief memoir is the access it provides to the inner workings of a marriage. Mourning affords a particularly raw clarity, and a freshly unmoored, cracked-open ability to articulate observations and thoughts that could only murkily take shape prior to the beloved's death.

At least that's what I imagine. I'm afraid to read any of those books now; I can barely contain my own story, so I can't quite convince myself that it would be a good thing to inhabit someone else's sorrow. When Mike was very sick he often reflected with some disappointment on how little appeal fiction held for him; at the worst times he simply had no room for other people's stories. Now I am in my own sickness, my own inward turn, and to others' gentle inquiries about whether I've read this grief-related memoir or that grief-related movie I can only say no, not yet. Maybe later. 

I don't want those narratives to crowd my loneliness. I don't want to know our story is like everyone else's. I want Mike and me and our family and all that happened to be ours and ours alone. It's so weird. Early widowhood does make me feel darkly special, set apart. Marked. I can no longer partake in "normal" life and I stubbornly refuse any story that promises to normalize this strange peripheral life I now move within.

Back to marriage. My relationship with Mike was the most private relationship in my life; I rarely reflected about it to anyone but him. I had my own unuttered thoughts about it, oddly-shaped pieces of furniture that I would occasionally scrape along the floor of the dark room of my mind to try them out from different angles. Sometimes I would catch a new shape in the dimness, but since I only ever talked about it with myself or with Mike it remained set apart from the rest of life. When it came to everything else - jobs and children and vacations and everyday challenges - I'd talk with trusted friends and family, which is like opening the blinds in the dark room, so that one realizes what you thought was a lumpy ottoman is in fact a pile of laundry. Oh! I see now. That didn't happen when it came to my most intimate relationship, my marriage. It was so very intimate as to be hard to pull out into the light and objectify and ponder about; so very private that I kept it private from myself. A marriage is unknowable to outsiders; maybe it is to insiders too.

Which is interesting, since my relationship with Mike, the least public part of me, was the central place from whence everything else flowed. The context in which all the tiny details of my days and nights took place. I didn't know that, not really, while he was still alive. I could linger in bed in the mornings and tempt a return to sleep because I knew morning-person Mike would get restless, eager for the day, and kick me out. I could live in blessed ignorance of the tax code because I knew he would take responsibility for our financial decisions. I could read one more chapter to the children without checking the hour because I knew he'd tell us when it was bedtime. I could let certain parts of myself lean off kilter without giving it any thought - our microdecisions that shift and move beneath thought - because I could trust him to lean back in my direction as needed to maintain the balance.

I guess I did the same for him.

But a year after his death, it's not any easier making sense of who we were then, and who we are now.  In the months after he died I struggled with fears about us: did we do it alright? were we good to each other? did I take good care of him? did he feel how much I loved him? did I let him love me back? I felt so disoriented and lost, unable to ask him to reflect our reality back to me, with no one who really knew (because no one really can know) what our lives together had been. I still can't pull it out and examine it. Who we were is too deeply part of who I am to be understood with any real sense.

Over the weekend Beatrice wanted to go through the old videos to see Papa. I'm always up for this. Frances joined us and we all tacitly understood that we would stop looking through the photos and videos when we got to his diagnosis. We wanted to see Mike before. There are precious few videos with him; we were late smartphone adopters and both he and I were mostly interested in documenting the children. But the bits we have are treasures, a precious reminder to me. The cancer chapter was so long and at times harrowing, so beset by uncertainty. We were just doing the best we could to hang on. But before then? It was pretty good. Sure, we had our problems, but we were a pretty great family, with our brilliant little ones, our cheerful house, our big open yard, and my handsome, funny husband and his powerful sensibility, quietly framing it all.

I've joked to a couple of friends lately that I'm knee-deep in the self-pitying stage of grief. Ha ha ha! I'm a resentful wreck! I seem to be surrounded at soccer games and school performances and church and the playground all the time with pretty great families comprised of two healthy parents and their beautiful children. When I see them walking hand in hand across a sports field, or sitting shoulder to shoulder in the auditorium, sometimes my mind automatically spits out (and maybe my lips too, I can't always be sure): Fuckers.

I do that. I really do. I walk by innocent young families out on a spring Sunday with their babies and dogs and nice shiny sunglasses and I think those fuckers. Then I think, for like half a second, good lord what has happened to me? And then I go right back to my husband isn't alive and they are and have absolutely no fucking clue what this is like. They get to have happiness, contentment, complaints about work schedules and who does the dishes, they get easy conversation with other parents standing around the slide, complaining about how hard it is to find time for a date night. They get to pass for normal, whereas I feel myself teetering under the weight of a big invisible neon sign on my forehead that reads: BEWARE! Bitter widow representing the fragility of all you hold dear! Look away! RUN while you CAN.

Yesterday I myself went running. To the cemetery. I haven't been running in a long time - the cold and damp scares me off - and I was happy to once again be moving over cracked sidewalks, through sun and shade, heading towards Mike and a place where I can take off that damn sign, where I can reenter the mysterious unknowability of my love for him and his love for me without anyone else around. It was hilly and I was tired by the time I entered the iron gates and headed up the gravely path towards his gravesite. Even so, I sprinted up the last grassy hill until I collapsed at his birdbath, leaning over the bowl of it, gasping and crying with relief. I'm here. 

After a few moments I sat in the grass and leaned against it. That's when I saw a young couple walking about a hundred yards off. The dad was wearing a Babybjorn, his newborn's chubby legs dangling in the air helplessly. They were happy, goofing around, taking selfies and pictures of each other on their cheery cemetery stroll. They settled down in the grass at the bottom of my hill to sit and have a breezy chat.

Seriously? I stared at them, all tear-streaked and snotty and sweaty. Didn't they hear me keening just now? Couldn't they have a bit more respect, give a widow a wider berth?

Mike, can you believe these two?

Alive Mike said, I can't. You've got to be kidding me. Get those awful people out of here.

Dead Mike said, Meagan, give them some slack. It's a beautiful day. You love this spot too. We were new parents once.

So I walked in the adjacent barren corn field, and wandered into the bordering woods, and down to the stream within that will be impossible to access a month from now when the undergrowth is thorny and thick. All was green and spare. I crossed back into the cemetery and the young family was still there.

I walked back up to Mike's grave, and sat with Dead Mike a little longer, letting his gentler spirit stir some part of me that I don't really understand. Alive Mike and Dead Mike do have this in common: they're both usually right. That quality could be infuriating, especially when it came to Mike's crazy accurate recall, rhetorical powers, and philosophical sophistication. But now I'm thinking of my husband's keen psychological sense, an attunement to when I (and most anyone we knew) was avoiding something or putting up a wall of anger or focusing on someone else rather than admitting to my own hurt feelings. He wasn't afraid to tell the truth, and he had a gleaming, precise way of communicating that got right down to the issue at hand.

Living and Dead Mike agreed. They aren't actually fuckers, Meagan. You're suffering and lonely and it hurts to see them. We can't begrudge them the pleasures of new parenthood, the obliviousness to the kind of loss you're staggering under. They'll face it someday. We all do. Let their joy live alongside your suffering without resentment. It's alright.

Oh Mike, I thought, you're so good. And right. Ugh. I still felt annoyed, but I no longer felt like those fuckers were brazenly stealing my visit. When I was ready, I ran right past them, all the way home.