laugh it off

And what did your father do then? 

My dad, embodying a very serious analyst character, would look at me over the tops of his glasses, head positioned at a thoughtful tilt.

Go on. Say more, Meagan. 

That was how he dealt with questionable parenting moments, microconflicts between us: imagining how I would describe them to my therapist decades hence. He played both parts, with gusto. 

Well, Dr. So and So, he meant well, but he was always tossing the cats off the counters when he got mad.

And ... how did this cat-tossing make you ... feel?

The dialogue always made me laugh, even when I was seven years old and not really clear on why the exchange was funny. I hadn't yet encountered Freud cartoons in the New Yorker or watched the Sopranos. But as with so much of my father's humor I went along for the ride. It was thrilling to be in on adult jokes, indecipherable ones included. 

The therapist routine wasn't just funny; it was an elegant emotional pivot that communicated: I recognize I did something that upset you. I'll be self-deprecating and reassuringly in charge of the narrative all at once. Let's acknowledge it without getting too mired in it. Let's have a laugh!

My dad is surely to blame when it comes to my predilection for silly voices and accents. And my tendency to use humor in tense moments. I just love a big cathartic laugh.

Once on the walk to school when Beatrice was in second grade, I tried to make her laugh a little too soon after talking about some hard feelings. She did laugh, then paused abruptly on the sidewalk and looked back at me with anger in her eyes. 

You always do this! You make me laugh when I'm upset! Mama, you really invalidate my feelings when you do that. 

Whoops.

As one of my clients said after I was interrupted in our session yesterday by my kids, whom I'd left unable to make it to band camp by accidentally taking the car key to my office, Wait - Meagan - are you a bad mother?

Sometimes!

Anyway, I've passed on the goofball humor coping strategy to them too. Gabriel is now eighteen years old, back from the Appalachian Trail, and confronting all the complications of adult life. He has to let the doctor know they're allowed to talk to me so I can help him upload health forms. He has to register to vote, and with the selective service system. And he has to give his new college permission to let me have access to his student account so that I can upload the documents financial aid wants from me and ensure the bill is paid correctly while he's at work.

Right now I can't see the status of your bill; only you can see that.

Gabriel, sweaty and tired after a day of mulching, stood over my little work station at the dining room table, looking a bit lost. My financial aid notes covered a section of the Sunday paper next to my laptop.

So... you just need to log in, then make me an authorized payer...

In an instant Gabriel's beleaguered mind returned to his body. He knew just how to handle this situation - a new schtick!

Um...hello, Swarthmore College? Do you know Mama? Just talk to Mama! 

Still in character: Mama is...Mama. You know Mama. She's Mama! 

We both laughed so hard. When you are 18, a part of you is four years old, and a part of you is 30. You are independent and responsible and ready for anything. You are so capable! But also, you are wanting Mama to just take care of it. 

Little G keeps coming back. This morning, when I offered to put a book on hold from the library for him, he responded with a vacant smile and lispy voice, a hapless child looking up at the librarian. Mama has a library card! Do you know Mama? She gets books for me!

Gabriel and I have a long history of this. We play our cats as 1930s mobsters (how we cope with the dark suspicion that we are neglectful pet owners - imagining asthmatic Lulu as Lu Capone). We pretend to be Winston Churchill-adjacent clueless arrogant colonists (how we cope with the moral discomfort of our privilege - what what!). We are affectless Russian dissidents straight from the gulag (a check on complaining about minor discomforts). 

Sometimes we voice insects, just for fun. Gabriel and Beatrice still reference my old man caterpillar voice, a character I invented many years ago while watching a slow caterpillar face off with a bunch of energetic ants.

So of course we're managing the strangeness of this transition summer with absurdist humor. 

When I was expecting a second child, I thought: this will be a breeze! I know how to get a baby to take a nap and a bottle, no problem. But then the second child arrived and he was a completely different person with completely different needs. One has to learn how to do things all over again.  

Going off to college? Same delusion. I did this with Frances (yep, it was brutal). I even did a trial run and said goodbye to Gabriel at the AT trailhead. He was on the trail for roughly a semester. So this is no big deal, right? I'm practiced! 

But I am beginning to realize it doesn't matter. You can't prepare for these massive upheavals in life. (You can pretend to all you want). They happen. That is all. 

I will not be able to laugh all the way to move in day. I know. I still carry the memory of my dad's grief when he and my mom dropped me off at Swarthmore over thirty years ago, so palpable in the way he fussed over setting up my desktop computer and stereo, and the uncharacteristic quiet leading up to our goodbye in a strange parking lot. His sorrow. It crushed me. 

Gabriel and I will do this our way. I'm gonna try not to do any damage with my sadness. (And how else did your mother burden you with her overpowering emotions, Gabriel?) But I know he already feels it. You can't get around it, not even with the finest hijinks and hilarity. Mama is Mama. Gabriel is Gabriel. My dear boy is growing up.  

best day of the year

Tomorrow my dead husband would be 51 years old, and my alive boyfriend will be 51 years old. 

Isn't that super weird?

It'll be my fifth attempt to celebrate their birthdays on the same day, and I'm not sure repetition has made me any better at it. On the first May 23rd, I drove to Thomas' place in Philly for lunch, handed him a gift, and burst into tears.

I learned that they were born on the very same day on our first date. Also gleaned from that conversation: like Mike, Thomas grew up in a Catholic family and has three sisters. I asked for a tour of his (visible) tattoos that night, so didn't learn until later about Jacques Derrida's face inked on Thomas' shoulder. Mike went to grad school in part to learn about him from a particular scholar, and once, in the pre-GPS era, wound up chauffeuring Derrida to dinner during a conference; thank goodness Jacques was unaware that Mike possessed the worst sense of direction on the planet. Despite this they somehow arrived on time, without incident.

This strange cosmic alignment feels like God taking me firmly by the shoulders and saying: you can't have a second love in your life without confronting the fact that you do because you lost your first to tragic illness and death, because of the person you became in the aftermath, because many realities live inside you. It is all deeply, intimately connected; don't try and pretend it isn't!

Once, lying in bed in the harrowing days after his stem cell transplant, Mike and I were talking about what would happen after he died. I didn't want to be having that conversation. I remember looking away at the blue walls, the embroidered bedspread, anywhere but his face. He said something about how I'd probably have another husband someday. 

But I don't want another husband, I said, suddenly turning to him. I have a husband! 

Yes, he replied. But after I die, we won't be married anymore. Until we are parted by death. That's what we said to each other. 

That was more than I could take in at the time. What could he possibly mean? Of course we would still be married after he died. 

But he was right. I am a widow and we aren't married anymore. And the idea of marrying again? Now I kinda like the idea. I even like that I like it. On May 23rd God shines a light on the fact that the me who once curled over in pain at the very idea of having a different husband, and the me who smiles thinking about how on my wedding day my girls could style me however they'd like for once live in the same body. 

The desperately besotted twenty year old, the young mother reading aloud contentedly to her children, the purist, the perfectionist, the philosopher's wife who too often swallowed her anger, the caregiver, the advocate, the cook, the yogi, the sounding board, the woman uncertain if she would ever find her own professional footing, the tentative writer, the woman who was too quick to turn away from her own heart to accommodate the needs of others. Mike knew all those parts of me well. 

He didn't live to know the other parts that have grown stronger in his absence, and how the aforementioned parts have morphed and stretched, as our marvelous children grow older and I become more closely acquainted with my own heart. My confidence and skillfulness as a therapist, widowhood-anchored strength, growing comfort with my own imperfections, intentional efforts to release the preoccupation with being good. Now I can be boundaried, pissed, absurd, disagreeable. Not often. But it's possible. I treasure that possibility! I can be a protagonist who lets herself want things, all kinds of things, including a middle-aged, serious, playful, inconveniently long-distance love with a man born on May 23rd.

Mike always said it was the best day of the year. 

Thomas is evidence supporting that claim. How wonderful that he was born and lived a whole life whose paths curved closely to - but never touched - my own, until our respective contained multitudes collided at the moment they did. And that he generously and patiently makes space for my mixed up, grief-tinted May 23rd feelings - and on his birthday no less! 

I can't wait to see him tomorrow. 

heaven goggles

The past few weeks have been full to the brim. There was picking up Gabriel at Harper's Ferry and bringing him and his friends home for a big Easter celebration, followed the next day by his 18th birthday party, and the next weekend by my mother's 75th birthday party. I've been growing my private practice, supporting my students at work, waking up early to exercise, mothering my children, planning the summer, and feeling lots of feelings without much space to feel them in.

But then last Thursday evening I picked up Gabriel and his friend Emerson for one more day off the trail while they were in Pennsylvania. Early Saturday I made them dozens of pancakes, then drove them back to Hawk Mountain for a final goodbye until the trail's end in Maine. Parting on the side of the road, surrounded by new spring green leaves and crisp dappled sunshine, hugging my enormous child, my heart's elastic stretched farther than seemed reasonable. 

He was happy and healthy, capable and cheerful. Adventuring forth, he embodied everything a mother could want for her child, and yet it was all I could do to hold back my tears. He knew it, and hesitated.

Go, go! I'm fine, I'm okay. Have a great day on the trail!

The tears pressed against my eyes said don't go, the tears said go, the tears said I am so proud and happy, the tears said we will flow and flow, and touch all the rivers you cross ahead.

I held them back until I couldn't see the boys anymore and got back into the car. 

After my cry, I drove home through green hills and farmland, listening to the Plum Village podcast The Way Out is In. The tears came right back, in a different gentle spirit, as a monk told loving stories of Thich Nhat Hanh in the days after his stroke at age 89 that illustrated his acceptance of death, deep understanding of interbeing, and delight in the sangha, communicated clearly in his smile when he could no longer speak. He recounted how Thich Nhat Hanh used to tell his Christian friends the kingdom of heaven is right here. All you need is to listen to the birds singing, feel the sunlight on your skin, look into the beloved faces of your family and friends. It is happening, right now, all around you. 

Something about the pain and tenderness of goodbyes can make a space for the stealth kingdom of heaven - normally so hidden by the noise of everyday life - to become more detectable, palpable, illuminated. I listened to the podcast, and I saw it shining through the pollen-dusted windshield of my car.

There have been irritable, rushed, angry, snapped at by strangers, frustrated by insurance, and burdened by my laptop's dying battery type moments since that morning, and in them I have sometimes remembered to try it out. I say to myself: Meagan, the kingdom of heaven is right here. 

Right. In all this disaster, right here. Sometimes, when I'm hanging on by my fingernails, the sentiment just makes me laugh. But most of the time, intentionally putting those heaven goggles on works. 

This new tiny practice has cracked me wider open to the poignancy of a thousand pink petals scattering the sidewalk in a glorious mess, pale new leaves above bereft of their delicate finery, already preparing for the deeper greens of summer. To the choppy waves of emotions with Beatrice on a drive to Philadelphia that eventually - magically - led to us belting along to pop songs with all the windows down, Ramona the dog in the backseat closing her eyes in the bliss of spring air streaming around the planes of her upturned snout. To my boyfriend's face in quiet profile, and a poem tacked on my office wall I haven't read in months but is just as beautiful as ever.  

To the tenderness and porosity of being with my clients in their vast felt experience.

One of them, who has a long history of depression, told me that she knows something has changed inside. She is learning how precious she is, and it is revelatory. I filled up with joy, and so did she, laughing out loud together. We spent the rest of our session exploring what about therapy and her life and her relationships and her work has supported this new brilliant knowing. What set this change in motion? At the end of it all, she paused, then smiled at me, and said, 

...it could just be the weather?

More laughter. Definitely could be, I said.

It sure is easier to know the kingdom of heaven in pink-and-green April than it is in brown-and-gray March. All the same. I'll take it. 

the march of water & the waters of march

When we were young and unmarried and childless, Mike once gently said something to the effect of: Meagan, sometimes you twist a knife in the wound of your dad's loss. It's like you want it to hurt worse. Maybe it doesn't have to hurt so much.

I mean, okay. Yes. I likely was twisting an enormous dull knife in my own oozing grief-wound then. But I wanted it to hurt, because in the hurting I felt connected to my dad. I was afraid of living without stabs of pain. I was afraid of becoming an adult without his help. I missed him so much. 

It will be thirty years without him on March 22nd, and eight years without Mike tomorrow. 

I started watching The Pitt last night. (An aside: whoa). Anyway, after seeing lots of up close and personal stab wounds and incisions, I am happy to say with utter confidence that I no longer push or twist any knives in my heart. 

Eventually I learned that I don't have to poke at and reopen something from my past in order to connect with it, because losing a beloved person isn't a singular event. It's a river that courses through my temporal physical spiritual body, where it has become integrated into the landscape. It's a stream of tenderness that moves through me and never stops. Clear water that can be shockingly cold, quietly burbling, hard to wade through, or relieving on a hot day.

I have lived my entire adult life with the cracked-open pain of grief. Who would I be otherwise? It's impossible to know, and who cares anyway? I like the person I am, easy tears and all. A throughline of loss connects me to the true nature of people, things, reality: all of it laden with love, complicated, never all one thing but containing so very many things, reminding me that time and touch and other people's eyes are mysteries impossible to fully pin down with words.

So yeah, no knife twisting required. If anything, my intention these days is to simply widen the channel. To try to welcome rather than get mad at the river when it unexpectedly overflows its banks. Like the ancient Nile (so many history podcasts in our family, forgive me) that flooded annually, leaving renewed fertile soil behind that supported an incredible civilization for thousands of years.  

(I really can't stop with this metaphor, I am caught in its relentless current, somebody sit on my fingers...! No? Okay, fjording ahead.)

My children and I keep moving farther away in time from the day Mike died. It definitely freaks me out. When I notice the vastly different developmental moment we are now in, it's scary and discouraging - we are being further separated from one another and I can't make it stop. But then the river swells with the sorrow of love, as it always does in March particularly, and connects me to the child and woman I used to be, and the woman I will become, and to the people I love with a fathomless depth that have shaped me to the core, and I am reassured. 

The panicky objections subside. There's nothing to fight or grasp at. I just have to allow this sun-and-shade dappled river to flow freely, and trust it won't break me. 

I stopped at Mike's tree on the walk to work today. The sun was shining. There are tiny buds on its spindly branches! I rested my hands on the solid warm trunk, and felt my heart stretch - with missing Mike, and with gratitude for a more peaceful grief. 

May all our nurturing tender rivers flow and flow, connecting us to one another, living and dead, and the vast ocean beyond.