About two weeks after we'd moved, I had a vivid dream. Mike was walking through the new house, looking around in dismay, at times in anger, asking me things like why did you get rid of the desk? this room is so small; didn't you realize the couch wouldn't fit? what were you thinking, buying this house?
In my dream he hated it. In my waking life I hated that he had never lived in it, and now we did.
Last night I had another such dream; Mike was on the periphery during a weird dream-logic vacation and my only direct contact with him involved him being upset with me, noting ways I had changed, responding with some judgment. In the dream moment I remembered that I had a boyfriend. I didn't want to upset my husband so I decided not to mention it. But I couldn't hide the fact that I wasn't the same person he had been married to, because his death had changed me. He could tell, and he didn't like it.
Terrible dream. Awful. My waking mind does not for a minute think Mike is upset with me for changing. I don't even think he cares too much about the boyfriend; I really do believe he wants me to be supported and happy. But I struggle with accepting these things. My brain twists them into painful narratives at night.
And yet I notice changes happening inside me, without even trying to make them happen, and I notice that they are good. Beautiful, even. Life is hard as heck but I feel good about my work, my parenting, my friendships; I am kinder to my own body. And then a little part of me says but how can you be more you, more expansive, more accepting of yourself, after losing Mike?! And even scarier: did losing Mike enable you to become more fully yourself?
And what would that mean about me, about my marriage, about Mike, about us, if it did?
When my mom had a hysterectomy in her early 50s, she had not yet begun the process of menopause in earnest. After the trauma of that surgery - after an organ in her body that had reminded her of her own fertility for decades, had housed my and my sister's growing bodies and spirits, and had stretched and twisted under the insistent heft of fibroids was removed in a moment with cold metal instruments - menopause was kicked into high gear. She got thrown into it hard, and there was no turning back. She had to figure out how to respond to hot flashes on the fly.
If her uterus had not been taken suddenly from her body, she would have eased into that change over a span of years. She would have wound up on the other shore eventually; the journey would have been remarkably different.
I think what is happening to me is something like that. My husband was taken from me. He was a person I knew intimately, like an organ in my own body, a part of me so essential that I did not know who I was without him. I fell in love with him when I was an uncertain twenty year old woman-child. There was a lot about myself I didn't like then. He seemed to love me anyway, but I was afraid to expose that darker shameful stuff to the light of his gaze any more than necessary. I loved being in love with him; I didn't want anything about either of us, especially me, to screw it up.
Much later in our years together, those pushed-aside bits started to emerge, to insist on being part of the conversation. Quietly, mostly in the background but also occasionally in loud and inconvenient and interpersonally painful ways, I was trying to change. To brave friction, disappointment. When Mike got sick, that process inside me, that becoming more me, was interrupted, complicated, somehow both sped up and slowed down.
If being more fully myself would better support him in those awful times, I was into it. Up for the challenge of more honesty, more connection, more vulnerability. If it seemed like swallowing my own pain or anger or hurt would be easier, which was often the case with a beloved man who periodically lost hair and weight and the ability to speak and could barely swallow anything at all, it was hard. I mostly opted for honesty anyway, because I couldn't bear to feel any alienation between us. I'm not sure it was always the right move.
Then he was ripped from my body. Taken from me in a moment. I was thrown into the cold disorientation of grief and there was no way out but through. Actually there is no way out, not really, but there are ways to move forward. And I think after the initial months of shock, the uncomfortable process of being more myself that had hesitatingly begun before Mike's illness was thrown into high gear. Because what else could I do? Who else could I be? I could no longer take refuge within the structures of my marriage. There was nowhere else to turn.
It was just me in here, and it freaked me the fuck out.
I have to tell a story about it, you guys. I have to tell and retell this one. (You're thinking no duh, Meagan). I have to figure out why it's okay that I feel less shame and more openness about who and what I am now than I ever did when my husband was alive, when my life fit into easier, more comfortable compartments, when decisions weren't so wide open, when my own values and inclinations and wisdom were integrated within a two-person system.
I started seeing a therapist, someone adept in the therapeutic approach I've been learning about and utilizing with my own clients over the past two months. In our session yesterday we somehow ended with the image of a gate, the metal kind used to corral animals maybe, like in a rural English village or Vermont farm, rather bucolic, a gate the swings wide on its hinges and opens onto a meadow, green and lush in the autumn evening light. I like the sound of it squeaking a bit as it opens outward.
I would like to leave the gate wide open like that, always. I would like my mind to learn to make space for truer and gentler dreams.
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