on two incidents of crying in public

I drove Gabriel and my mother through shocking amounts of traffic to the Atlanta airport on Wednesday afternoon, arriving with less padding time-wise than we'd anticipated. It took us nearly three hours to get there from the peaceful mountaintop in Western North Carolina where Gabriel had spent the previous six weeks. The most stimulation he encountered there came in the forms of cacophonous birdsong, campers shout-singing during Morning Circle, thunderstorms, and Sunday texting on his grayscaled iphone10.  

We walked from the short term parking lot to the ticketing area for United. I watched his wide eyes set in his alert, expressionless face scanning the vast space filled with hundreds of other faces and the accompanying sound of hundreds of wheeled suitcases bumping along the tiled floor, trying to make sense of it all. 

We checked his duffle. We'd spent the morning packing all his gear, checking off items one at a time from a five page long list. I watched his tricep muscles tighten as he leaned over the desk to fill out an identification tag and wondered. 

And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful boy.

And yet. There we were. 

My mom opted to wait for us, safe in an eddy outside the women's room while we entered the rushing current of people barreling towards the TSA line.

We did not speak. I could see his mind calculating the length of the line, the amount of time needed to get to his gate, whether he'd need to take one of those trains through the airport terminals as our feet moved one after another beneath us, propelling us towards our parting.  

And then we hugged goodbye. His body was tensed to face the challenges ahead. I told him I loved him and watched him walk briskly off, into the line, into the next 30 days.

I exhaled. I stood very still after he'd left my sight, and I cried. 

An airport worker walked by, then slowed to look back over her left shoulder at me. She wore large cat's eye glasses with translucent blue frames and perfect pink lipstick. She said, are you alright honey?

Yes, I nodded pathetically, still crying. I'm okay.

She turned on her heel and walked right back towards me. 

There's no crying in my airport! she said as she opened her arms and pulled me into a full embrace. 

I collapsed into her. He'll be fine, I sobbed. I felt I had to both explain my behavior and indicate that I was still rational, but she could've cared less. She released me with some more clucking maternal noises and went off to do her job. I felt loved by this stranger, and that made me cry more. 

Soon after my mom and I made our way back into the brutal summer Atlanta traffic, we learned his flight to Denver was delayed. And delayed again. And finally delayed so much that he wouldn't be able to catch his connecting flight to Wyoming, which was one of only two flights to Riverton, Wyoming each day, and so I began a series of phone calls to reschedule his travel and coordinate with his NOLS program and arrange a stay with our friends in Boulder that night. 

After many hours of this during our drive north, including an extended conversation with an incredibly nice woman named Marlene who runs Gator Creek Taxi in Riverton, in the end Gabriel managed to make his flight and land in Wyoming a little before 2 am EST. He didn't have his bag, but he didn't care. He made it! And somehow his canceled shuttle was miraculously waiting and brought him to Lander. And so his NOLS adventure began.

I don't know what to make of all the ways I have been feeling ever since Gabriel sat me down in the dining hall at camp one year ago to tell me his plan: graduating high school a year early and taking a gap year to hike the Appalachian Trail before he went to college. I had arrived early to volunteer at camp before driving him and Beatrice home and I had not expected him to tell me that. I mostly just listened, impressed by his resolve, disoriented by the idea of losing out on an entire year of him at home.

We got home and he set about making it happen. He changed his schedule and status from junior to senior. He deepened his connections with a cohort of senior friends. We went on college visits. He went to prom and graduation and senior week. He applied to be a CIT this summer at camp.

I was the one that suggested this NOLS course. I knew it would be stressful getting him directly from camp to Wyoming. I knew the gear list would make my head hurt. I knew we'd miss him like crazy for 30 days with no contact at all after six weeks in North Carolina. But I also suspected it would be the kind of formative experience that stays with a person forever. And I knew I'd be a lot less nervous about the months of thru hiking with his good friend that lay ahead.

Now he's been out in the field for five days. On his third day in the Rockies, I went with Beatrice and Thomas and his daughter Junah to see our longtime favorites, Ballet X, perform their summer series in Philadelphia. I especially wanted to see a piece called The Last Glass, set to music by Beirut, of which I knew little besides it was a company favorite and featured joyful, expressive movement.

The piece is organized around couples who come together in community as a whole, but also perform a series of pas de deux that each tell a story. Every dancer has a distinct character. And while there are a variety of compelling interpersonal challenges expressed in their dances, the character who struck me most deeply - the quiet persistent center of the whole piece - was the one whose challenge stems from the fact that her partner is dead. At least that was my interpretation. She wanders the stage alone sometimes, curled in on herself in pain, looking for something that we can't see. And sometimes she dances with a man dressed all in white who continually slips through her fingers just when she seems to be relaxing into his presence. His face eludes her hands; his body slides along the floor into the wings as she helplessly watches him go. A cruel trick. The other couples danced around her.

It made me cry.

Her physicality sent me back to the weeks and months after Mike died, when my body hurt all the time. It was like taking punches to the gut over and over. Curling in on oneself, barely breathing. How memories comfort until the floor suddenly opens beneath you in the brute pain of absence (there's that cruel trick). I didn't think about those excruciating days sitting in the audience and on the walk back to the car; I rather breathlessly watched the dancers while a part of me felt that deep embodied grief. 

(Beatrice, later: isn't it amazing that a dance can bring up so much emotion?)

(And there is something there too, about how I didn't want therapy and talking then so much as tending to my hurting body. I needed hands on my skin, breath in my lungs. And how now, I dance.)

After all the tears, I thought about my completely unexpected response to that dance. My mom and I had a lot of time together driving to pick up Gabriel and take him to the airport; some of our conversations centered around my kids. How they are growing up. How we made it through some terrible times together.

On one of the rare searing moments when Mike and I acknowledged that he might die of his relentless disease and leave me a widow and the children fatherless, I had a bright flash of knowing run through me. We'll be okay, I told him. I will live for them. Then we cried together.

It was true. Especially in the beginning. I lived for them. 

They kept me getting up in the morning and making breakfasts and packing lunches and going to work. All I wanted was to give them respite from the pain of illness and death; I wanted to give them normal life, to cover up all the glaring not-normalness of where we found ourselves. 

We have all healed and grown so much since then. But for a very long time they were the anchors I clung to for dear life. They have been a cover when I couldn't bear to be responsible for myself. At times I have hidden away behind their sparkling presences; it takes real intention and effort to allow my own priorities to be important, even now, when they encourage me to. 

And now they are leaving. Our unit exists intact in our hearts and minds; not so much on the earth where we are rarely all in the same place. Frances is in Buenos Aires, Gabriel is in Wyoming, Beatrice is on an overnight trip with a friend and her family. I am sitting in a Starbucks outside Philadelphia.

That dancer also tapped my grief over my boy's departure; over the way my children rooted me in the life that I built for them from our old rubble, only to grow up and leave it. 

They are becoming healthy, independent, adventuresome, brilliant, funny young adults - just the way a mother might hope they would. It's ideal; it's shocking. How could they? 

I am grateful to them for helping me survive the most crushing loss imaginable. And - yes, it's true! - also grateful to them for growing up, and without their needs to hide behind, forcing me into another no-net style chapter of growth and discovering in ever deeper ways what I feel, what I want, who I will become.

Gabriel, I can't believe you left a year early. Gabriel, my heart sings for you, and for all of us. 

marking the occasion

I was walking down the central thoroughfare in the grocery store today after work, and slowed my pace to peer down an aisle, trying to remember if we needed canned beans. There I spied a narrow back belonging to a fair-headed man in a t shirt and black jeans. He was leaning over his cart, elbows resting on the handle as he made some similar domestic calculation. I saw him fleetingly, less than a second as I walked by, but the hunch of his shoulders was so like Mike. Something about the frame, the posture. What a gut punch. A gut-and-heart punch. I pulled over in the next aisle and looked at the teas, breathing, waiting for the tears tightening my throat to relax and sink back down to their usual quiet depths. Mike. You surprised me.

Tomorrow will mark fifty years since he was born. 

And it will mark fifty years since my boyfriend Thomas was born.

It will mark forty-nine years since my glamorous twenty-five year old parents were married in Pittsburgh, and 104 years since my grandfather was born in Texas, the only child of Roy and Fay Howell, who were forty and thirty-nine years old at the time. (How long did they struggle with infertility? Were there miscarriages? How unlikely was his birth?)

I saw on Instagram yesterday that May 23rd is a favorite barre and dance teacher's birthday too. Is she also part of the mysterious cosmic conspiracy revolving around tomorrow's date, to which I may well owe the most important parts of me, the most important of all being my very existence? Probably! 

In six days I will take Frances to the Philadelphia airport to fly to Buenos Aires for a summer internship. In seven days I will file into our town's minor league baseball stadium to cheer on seven hundred McCaskey High School graduates, and my shining son Gabriel will be among them. A few days after that I will help him pack many disparate items off an extensive packing list that I cannot seem to contend with yet and cram them into our little EV, and drive him to the Smoky Mountains for 6 weeks of being a CIT followed directly by a month of adventuring in Wyoming. 

And tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Beatrice from four days on the Chesapeake Bay with her fellow sixth graders, just in time to take a rhubarb upside down cake to the cemetery where we can cry and laugh in that sacred place that brings us a hair's breath closer to Mike than we are in regular life. Then on Saturday we'll go to Philadelphia to celebrate Thomas's half century on this planet in style. He will be fifty years old, and that is very, very good. I smile typing it.  

I have zero answers in response to the open question that is tomorrow. How can Mike and Thomas have the exact same birthday?* How can a person grieve and celebrate all at once? How can I find the vast space I need inside to hold it all? 

And more than that, how I can live these impossibilities while I continue to go through the many motions required to help my two oldest children set out for distant shores and become ever more independent of the nest I have poured my heart into for the past twenty years? This nest barely resembles that one I first feathered with Mike. It's full of lanky teenage boys' laughter, skin care products, a lunatic barking dog, opinions about protein intake, episodes of The Americans, internet-fueled slang I cannot keep up with, cat hair, smelly running shoes, expensive ice cream, and interruption-peppered conversations about politics and school and relationships and history and AI and media and books and other people and feelings. These days, the only thing I'm allowed to read out loud to them is the Vows section of the Sunday Times (thanks Beatrice). 

Nonetheless this nest, such as it is, holds our shared memories of being a family of five. The exquisite heaviness of all the change hits me hard sometimes. It's my forever problem - one more impossible space to live inside of - I love to see them grow, and I love them just exactly the way they are right now. 

So, right. No answers. Only love-as-grief, love-as-tenderness, love-as-unease, love-as-bafflement. 

In other words a heart, full to the brim.

*Astrologists, I welcome your thoughts. 

don't leave

Not too long ago, Gabriel got his drivers license. The fact that he passed his test and has a little plastic card with his picture on it tucked in a silicon slot affixed to the back of his phone has not magically put me at ease when I am in the passenger seat and he is behind the wheel. I am vigilant as ever.

So when we were making a left out of the alley behind our house into two way traffic, a maneuver that features terrible visibility due to the cars parked along the street, I said to Gabriel, 'you know, I still have to close my eyes every time you do this.' 

'Me too, Ma,' he confided in turn. 

It took me a beat. Then my eyes flew open, and I turned and punched his arm. He was already laughing, eyes wide open and fixed on the road.

'Got ya.'

He did. For half a second, I believed that when he makes that scary turn and can't quite see who is coming from the left he closes his eyes and hopes for the best because that made sense to me. Let the other drivers of the world decide if this is a bad idea. Let the winds of chance determine if I survive this left turn. 

I've been thinking about it since. My younger self often closed her eyes, relinquished her own agency. Making an identity, asserting myself socially, taking risks, blazing my own trail - all of this was so hard. I longed for authentic expression, though I had no idea what that might look like in practice. Plus I was terrified of judgment. I didn't want to give anyone the chance to confirm my worst suspicions about myself. 

Poor dear.

That might explain the series of charismatic and controlling girls I befriended growing up, girls who were the protagonists while I played nice girl sidekick. I could feel my own edges begin to dissolve before the heat of their glittering presence, and I liked it.  

At least at first. Eventually I'd feel confined and resentful, but that initial thrill of dissolution and lightness was wildly compelling. Even as I got older and chose friends more wisely, I absolutely loved the runaway quality of good chemistry, and would happily stay up too late, skip a class, lie to my parents, whatever discomfort was required to sustain the pleasure of feeling my boundaries blur, of forgetting myself. 

People who go on guided psychedelic trips often report a profound experience of oneness with everything. They could also try laughing uncontrollably in a feedback loop to exhaustion with a girlfriend as an alternate path to spiritual unity. Your ego falls away; you are all presence, all connection. It's the best.

'Your friends are your crack,' my dad once declared to me in our kitchen. I was appalled. And anguished. How to explain to him that I didn't always like the ways I accommodated my friends' whims? How I struggled to set any boundaries at all? 

Of course when I fell in love for the first time, it was friendship crack times a thousand. It felt so good to take risks and break rules for someone else. To feel my wheels running off the road, to close my eyes and turn into whatever the oncoming traffic had in store. 

I think that a more grown up version of this was at work in my marriage. There was the delight of merging and the relief of not having to be responsible for my whole person. (Did I admit that to myself? I did not.) Mike made the big decisions; I busily made the everyday decisions that filled in their spaces. 

He picked the suburban house we bought in Annapolis, and I rode his confidence that it was the best choice for us, that we wanted the neighborhood and big yard for the kids, a vegetable garden, his native plant obsessions. And we were such a we, I could not tell you even now if that was the best thing for me or not. But I was the one pushing children on the swing set and weeding the garden while the mosquitoes drained me dry. Mike managed our budget and finances, and decreed a life of simplicity and frugality, which seemed virtuous and like something I could sign on to. I mean, I love thrifting! Eating low on the food chain! I made so many excellent pots of beans over the years.

I treasure those memories. I'm genuinely happy our kids had that landscape in their early lives. And yet. Would I have chosen it all if I was in charge? Could I even fathom then what it would mean to be in charge? To assert my difference? To say no thanks, I'd rather buy new shoes and an iced latte and some more freaking child care? 

I traded some of the burden of my existential responsibility for the security and pleasure of being loved. For safety, for those delicious moments of transcendent connection. But when you make that trade, you are loved through a glass darkly. There are distortions; it's built into the deal. 

You be in charge, and I will be the version of myself I believe you want me to be. My younger self made adjustments. I was afraid to say no; I was afraid to want more. Maybe I wouldn't be as lovable.

Along with a million other viewers, I streamed Conclave last week. In one scene, a priest comes to the dean of the Vatican, played by Ralph Fiennes, sharing that he has discovered information that sheds a negative light on one of the cardinals who may soon be elected to the papacy. This has come after other disturbing disclosures, and the dean loses his temper. He tells the other priest not to tell him what he has learned. He hates to talk about other priests like this. More than that, he hates to be in the leadership position he is in. Don't tell me, I don't want to know, because then I'll be responsible for that knowledge. 

Leave it in God's hands, he tells the priest. 

I found him so frustrating in that moment that I yelled at the screen. He was putting God in the spot I had at various times put my best friends and boyfriends and husband, afraid to take up his full subjectivity, integrity, responsibility for his own existence and duty to others. This mortal coil can be a real bitch. Close your eyes, nose the car forward. Call it piety, that sounds pretty nice. I get it.

I wish Mike never knew anything at all about lymphoma. I wish he never suffered so terribly, and I wish he had not died. And the excruciating loneliness and disorientation and endless solitary decisions I had to navigate after his death led me to learn so many things. 

I met with an AEDP therapist for about a year during the pandemic, tucked away wherever I could find a modicum of privacy in my house while Beatrice slid notes under the door asking for snacks and screen time. Even so, it was transformative. In one session, I found myself, with my therapist's help, trying to listen to what my heart was telling me. It was hard. I had to be so quiet and patient. But then it came, clear as a bell. Don't leave me. My heart said, don't leave me. 

When I met Thomas, I worried at myself. What about closing my eyes, what about the dissolving boundaries? Was this love? Because I kept saying when I didn't like something, or did like something, and even, with his support, sharing things that might be hard for him to hear, that might cause conflict. 

I want to teach my 20 year old self and my 12 year old self what this is like. Being more fully myself in the wide world of other people with so much safety inside. It is a treasure of middle age.  

I knew just what my heart meant that day. Don't leave me again. You just got here. Even in the long laughs, the long kisses. Don't go. 

So I haven't. 

not despite but because

I had a long day at work. After responding to a few last emails before I packed up my things to go home, I succumbed to a very strange impulse. I opened Facebook. I do this sometimes - check texts or social media or personal email after I finish up everything for the day at my office. It's a little time-sucking bridge between work and everything waiting for me at home. 

The first thing I saw was a post from a member of my online widows' group. She shared that it is her daughter's 20th birthday, and before this milestone, the waves of grief kept cresting and crashing because her husband wasn't here to behold their daughter's exquisite young adult self. And because she had promised him to keep the world beautiful and compassionate for their daughter, despite the crushing loss of him. It had been really hard to do that while carrying her own grief. 

I paused at my desk, feeling those words work their way into my tired body. Frances will be 20 this summer too. 

I responded to the post. I wrote that her boundless love, and her husband's, were so much bigger than loss could ever be for her daughter, who is out in the world doing incredible things. Their love buoys and supports her, offers a bright lens through which to see the world. It felt true as I wrote it.

I then abruptly closed my laptop and shoved it in my backpack, shut the door on my darkened office, and walked down the quiet hall - everyone else was already gone - out into the dusky light of evening. I went home where I was grateful to learn that my son and his friend were making dinner tonight, and so leashed up my dog for her walk with a bit of urgency in my step.

Maybe it was just the stress of the day that quickened my pace. Or the heaviness of my friend's post that I needed to move through. In any case, Ramona was initially delighted to trot along briskly with me, but when she insistently stopped to sniff the fire hydrant a block from my house I impatiently paused and waited. 

I sighed. I looked up.

And there was the sky!  

Bright pink feathery clouds in the west scudded across a purple-blue expanse. I watched them glide casually in the last gasp of light, as if it was no big thing to be a pink cloud in a glowing sky, as if there was nothing to see here, you people down on College Avenue going about your business while we do our regular old sunset thing up here all over again. 

The sight made me catch my breath, standing there while my dog sniffed and considered whether or not to pee on the hydrant and neighbors dragged their trash and recycling bins out to the curb. Here we all were, scurrying about beneath this impossible beauty, these ethereal pink forms stretching out so close to earth. It was not business as usual! I could feel my heart yearning so hard it hurt. 

I thought of my friend feeling the pain of her husband's absence, and the pain of all the years of her husband's absence. I thought of Mike, and how I saw the world when he was sick and in the early days after his death; it was so beautiful it nearly crushed me. There was nothing left to protect me from it. Ramona and I walked a little slower, said hello to the neighbors we passed with open faces. Even as the sky began to darken and the glow subsided, my neighborhood and all the people and animals and plants in it beneath the now-gray forms above remained heartbreakingly beautiful.

I was wrong. It's not that our experience of love is bigger than our experience of loss, which thus preserves the goodness of the world. It's that our love-soaked experience of loss, our broken hearts - if we're lucky - leave us cracked open to the beauty and compassion of the world. We see it, we feel it, we cannot shut it off or escape it. We perceive it with greater clarity than we did before. 

It is a treasure, all of it. The faces of strangers, the sky at dusk. It glows so bright it hurts our eyes. 

Our children learned too soon, a pain I would take away in a heartbeat if I could. Yet they are open to grace. They cannot unsee the beauty and compassion of the world, and now they are living into that truth. Vidita, your promise is kept. 

every moment is this moment

Yesterday morning I picked my way over the dark patch of ice at the bottom of my back stairs that has been growing by the day as the dryer vent in our alley melts the gathered snow there and sends it trickling towards the back door, where it promptly freezes in just the right spot for a rushing person to slide and fall. But I didn't! Then I avoided stepping in the forlorn little lumps of frozen dog poop in the backyard snow, made it to my parked car, drove the distance I really should be walking downtown, found a great parking spot, and made it to 8:30 am cardio barre class on time. Another triumph! (I am chronically three minutes late to everything.) 

And then two minutes into our warm up, feeling the pleasant effects of heat growing in my winter body to the encouraging sounds of Beyonce, my lower back totally freaked out. Pain happened. It was sudden and intense and I felt disoriented - what? huh? - and slowed my pace. It was a quintessential middle aged moment. So much was going right. I was feeling good and anticipating coming home after class, showering, packing Frances' things into the car and driving her to Princeton, where we'd go out to lunch and have a last gasp of carefree time together before her semester started. 

And then my body contemplated all this, looked around, noticed the accumulated stress of an intense week at work including many more seated therapy sessions than she is used to, noted the way I was throwing up my knees with Saturday morning abandon, and yelled: I object! 

And I was all like: well, that's fine for you lady, but I want to finish this class and have my day and you can't stop me. 

Yeah. Well, she wasn't into that. By the time I got back to my car an hour later to drive home, I could barely lower myself into the driver's seat. I gasped with pain. I hobbled into the house, where Frances had already lugged the big suitcase down to the back door and was getting ready to leave. The mere sight of her heavy object made my back throb more insistently. 

I told her about my back as I reached for the Advil. She treated my body with a lot more kindness than I had. She was patient, compassionate, and offered to drive. She loaded all her things into the car while I carried my coffee. On the ride, every time I shifted position in the seat, I made little ouchy noises, and she made little mothery noises back: oh, oh Mama, be careful, are you okay?

And we did all the things - slowly. We talked about everything in the car, as we do. We stopped at a madhouse of a Trader Joe's and got lots of snacks and loved it. We had enormous burritos for lunch, bulging packages of comfort resting on little aluminum trays lined with brown paper. We delivered one load of things to her dorm room, where she greeted her chipper roommate who was puzzling over her course schedule and whether she could possibly squeeze into a class with 15 people on the waitlist ahead of her. We walked back to the car to get the rest of it, which turned out to be a mere yoga mat and the bag of groceries. As I opened the car door to get them, my back yelped extra hard.

I think I should probably say goodbye to you here, I told her. I need to get home to a heating pad. 

Oh, she said. 

But I didn't want her to go. I didn't want our day to end. So we sat in the car together and held hands and talked some more. I told her it had been such a good break. I so enjoyed having her in home mode, slipped back into family routines and conversations, rested and restored, and even though it was good and right to do it, a part of me really hated to see her slide back into school mode. I would miss her. 

I felt so close to my eldest daughter. And it was time to say goodbye.

I was a lackluster hugger, what with my weirdo back, but she didn't complain. Then we kept on goodbye-ing as I stood empty-handed next to the car, and she walked away from me holding her heavy sack of yogurts and kombucha and dry shampoo, wearing her elegant camel-colored long wool coat and her beautiful dark hair in braids and looking very much the Princeton student. She smiled and said something about how I probably won't hear from her much because she'll be so busy this week. Her face was so open and beautiful. So her. I saw a flash of her bright curious two year old self, and a surge of uncomplicated and enormous love moved through my 47 year old body.

We are getting older. And sometimes, like in the Wawa parking lot adjacent to campus yesterday, time folds in and back, circling, and every moment is this moment. 

*    *    *    *    *

I made it home, where Gabriel and Beatrice were also kind and patient with me. Gabriel had friends over to play a game, and Beatrice and I set up pillows and a heating pad and a laptop in my big bed and watched A Real Pain and ate ice cream together. Now I want to go on a Holocaust tour to the places in Europe where my family comes from with an unhinged depressed charming cousin too. 

When I woke this morning, the sun was shining, my heart was full, and my back felt much, much better.