the year of the narwhal

Mike hated fun.

I can hear him right now, in response to me asking him to participate in some event we'd been invited to with feigned innocence and a determined looking away from my own ambivalence about such things: Meagan. You know how much I hate fun.

He meant commonly understood fun, like an amusement park in August or a fireworks display that goes on and on or a beer-themed 5K or standing around in the middle of Times Square in fifteen degree weather crushed by thousands of people wearing stupid hats and blowing noisemakers. Also anything that someone tried to convince him to do by saying c'mon, it'll be fun!

Mike found New Year's Eve to be mildly annoying. The pressure to have fun, the mustering of renewed celebratory energies after one has been bulldozed by the sugar and alcohol and family tensions and sheer consumerist weight of Christmas. Mike's new year was really early September anyway. He loved the ritual of school supply shopping, making new systems, getting organized and ready for the coming semester. That was the time for excitement and resolutions. We figured out once that he had only lived through six Septembers that didn't involve going back to school. Two of those were the window between college and grad school during which we fell in love. I was there and can attest that even though he wasn't actually going back to school, his heart was in the going back to school spirit, and he walked with an extra bounce in his step down our cracked Brooklyn sidewalks. Force of habit.

So our New Year's were mostly quiet ones, though even Mike succumbed to proper parties at times. I am thinking of one occassion when he uncharacteristically drank too much and danced with friends in a darkened Philadelphia apartment strung with Christmas lights and sticky with spilled drinks, wildly and even, with me, a bit suggestively, singing along with pop songs (because he knew all the words to all of them) and I was absoultely grinning inside and out at my reserved beloved- ha! Mike! What fun we're having! 1999 was more typical: we hung out with friends earlier in the evening and made it home to our apartment by midnight. We brought wine up to the roof and watched the fireworks and waited for some Y2K disaster to unfold before our eyes. It didn't, so we drained our glasses and climbed back in through the window. Thus began our 21st century.

So many friends have kindly commented to me that it will be a good thing to leave 2018 behind. That it was the very worst year, and it's time to be done with it. This is sort of true. But what is more true is that a year that Mike never got to see is in fact much worse than a year he lived in with us.

I feel afraid of 2019. I feel afraid of a future that just keeps going and going without my husband in it.

Grief feels like terror sometimes. It evokes particular fears: what if I forget, what if I dishonor him, what if I can never feel simple happiness again, what if there is no life after death, what if I could have advocated for him better, what if my children are hurt in ways I cannot help with, what if I squandered our time? But sometimes, without any content at all, I am gripped by it, the pain a mix of fear and anxiety and acute, acute sorrow.

Last night I went to the movies with my friend Diana. The movies! I was so happy to sit in the dark with an enormous bag of popcorn between us watching something decidedly inappropriate for children. We got home, we chatted and laughed with all the kids and her husband Teb who had fed them and stayed with them and mercifully cleaned every inch of my kitchen, including the dread stovetop. What wonderful friends I have! Everyone went home, my exhausted children went to bed, and I sat up late, feeling lost and alone. The beginning of the day and the end of the day are always the hardest for me, but this was worse than usual. Finally I cried and cried and talked to Mike until the tightest tangle of the terror feeling loosened.

I'm just not ready for 2019. I can't put on Mike's cavalier cloak of who-cares-about-New-Year's. Instead I'm just standing here naked, wrinkles and cellulite and all of it exposed, defenseless against the relentless ticking away. The numbers are changing, the date will be different, there's a new calendar in the kitchen and in my office, the world is screaming it from all sides. Time keeps barreling us along. Part of me wants it to, so that I will hurt less. A bigger part of me wants it to please slow down, or better yet, stop and move backwards instead.

Our friends Sarah and Robert visited us a few days ago and Sarah suggested we make a mural about what we want 2019 to be about together. I felt so grateful to her. We would never have done it on our own; we are all, I think, in our own ways, afraid of the future. Better to avoid considering it too much. But instead there we were with paints and crayons and markers sitting around a long piece of brown butcher paper unrolled on the kitchen floor, nudging the cats out of the way. It slowly filled with trees, leaping dolphins, handsome men, starry skies, cats, mountains, yogis, cups running over, mandalas, flowers, more cats.

And one narwhal.

I treasure Beatrice's narwhal. I delight in it. It was the first thing she drew, a creature both magical and real.

A narwhal is so improbable. Just like enjoying going to the movies in the midst of this sorrow, or laughing and crying over fancy drinks with Robert and Sarah in a new dress purchased with Heather in New Orleans earlier this month, or an amazing, wild mural hanging on the front of this house that Mike never lived in illustrating the beauty and love that awaits us in 2019.

2019, a year that terrifies me.

2019, the year of the narwhal.

win-lose

Tonight I am taking Gabriel to meet a new guitar teacher. He happens to play in a band with a gentle and poetic sensibility, which seems a good fit for my big-hearted boy (or at the very least a good fit for my big-hearted feelings about my big-hearted boy).

Mike and I listened to one of their albums, Befriended, over and over during the 2004-2005 academic year, driving in my dad's old Nissan Altima between our home in Germantown and our schools in Villanova and Bryn Mawr. I graduated with my social work degree in May, and gave birth to Frances in June. That album is the soundtrack to a tender time of growing into parenthood, saying goodbye to our life without children as it had been, and welcoming with not a little trepidation an unknown way of life that would be dedicated to an unknown person. I remember sitting in a parking lot near Bryn Mawr's library, settled in the Altima's passenger seat with my feet propped on the pale glove compartment door, watching sunlight filtered through moving trees overhead play on the windshield, feeling Mike next to me in the driver's seat, letting a song finish before I broke the magic space of the car to pick up a book I needed, my heart aching with a kind of love-anguish, my baby's feet digging up underneath my ribs.

Nobody knows, darling. Nobody knows how they are loved. 
Don't worry my darling, the sun's coming up. 

My baby didn't know how blasted open our hearts already were.

In those days I was seeing an outside supervisor to help me with my field practice. I went to her because I felt like a complete failure, a useless deer in the headlights during my therapy sessions. I was devastated by how surprisingly ill-suited to psychotherapy I seemed to be. I started crying whenever I talked about it, which made my on-site supervisor begin to question the whole arrangement, which made me cry more.

Rochelle did not make me cry. She definitely made me laugh. Her office was in Chestnut Hill, and felt like a very well lived in living room, full of overstuffed pillows and books and battered furniture from decades past. The first time I knocked on her door she hollered 'Come on in! I can't get up!' and sure enough, as I cautiously peered in and scanned the room looking for her, my eyes lit on a 70-something woman wearing brilliant fuschia lipstick sitting in a wingback chair with her foot, set in some kind of orthopedic contraption, propped on a pile of blankets that slid around on an ottoman as she moved, which she did when she talked, thus requiring frequent tending, smiling and beckoning with sweeping arms for me to stop hesitating at the door and come in already.

How I loved her. We talked about my fieldwork for maybe 12 minutes over the hours that I met with her. Mostly what I remember talking about is the sense of loss I felt as my body moved closer and closer to giving birth. I told her my fear that what Mike and I liked to do most over the course of a leisurely evening - cook, listen to music, eat, drink wine, talk and talk and talk, and talk some more, and then be quiet and listen to music, and then talk again - would never happen again, once this baby arrived. We would only pay attention to it. We would never have the space and freedom to be together in that way again.

She leaned forward in her chair, hovering over that boot. She nodded and clucked and made a lot of empathetic noises; she smiled often. Rochelle had heavy plastic-framed glasses that made her eyes seem even bigger than they were. She told me of course you're worried about that; she told me don't worry about that. She told me that she and her husband liked to do that best, too, and that it didn't stop when they had kids. She told me we would always be us, even though we would also be forever transformed by parenthood.

She spoke personally, warmly, with an authenticity that I soaked up and took a lot of comfort in. We ended up focusing on the transition I was in the middle of, but now that I look back, I can see that her example helped me with my field work more than any case review could have. I walked away knowing that I could be a therapist, and be myself while doing it - that that, in fact, would be ideal. I had been laboring under the notion that I had to act like a therapist, that is, back myself way up and out of the picture in order to put on a nice counselor face and say all the right things and have lots of amazing insights. Rochelle taught me that I could just be present and real, and the rest of it would flow from that.

I would go home to our cozy apartment on the third floor of an old stone house on Germantown Avenue, and tell Mike while we washed dishes in the galley kitchen with a black and white checkerboard linoleum floor that glowed beneath the overhead light and an enormous warped window that opened to the lush treetops from the estate of the historic home next door, Rochelle says it'll be okay. She says we will still be us. I'd offer this information with a little smile and tone that suggested I knew that Mike did not in fact recognize the Authority of Rochelle but I wanted to tell him anyway, so he would know it was reassuring to me at the very least.

We slept then in a double bed, with an iron frame painted white that came from my family. Frances sleeps in it now. Over twenty years of spooning with Mike, I was always on the outside, and that was true throughout my pregnancy too. Somehow my huge belly still fit just right (though that bottom arm was/is always such a problem - where to tuck it, without it falling asleep?) and the baby always seemed to start practicing martial arts, or acrobatics, or driving a truck, or whatever it was she did in there, just as I would lie down to go to sleep. So it became a routine at night, to snuggle up next to Mike, happy in anticipation of the baby kicking me and through me, him. She threw little punches that landed square on his back. We would lie there smiling in the dark, feeling her shake things up.

I played the Innocence Mission for Gabriel this morning and I thought of all those times. I thought of the bittersweet tenderness that a you-can-never-go-back change ripples through a person, a family.

We were very happy; we were very sad. In the spring we made plans to leave Philly. Mike made plans to leave academia. I began to make plans to find my first social work job. The baby would come, and everything would change.

Earlier this week I was supposed to have lunch with a new friend who is also going through a terrible loss. She works near me, and because we had to cancel the lunch, I asked if I could run up to her office just to give her a quick hug. I took the outdoor stairs leading to her part of the building, hearing my steps echoing on the metal, feeling the cold emanating from the railing. It was a crisp, sunny day but in the shade of the stairwell it was awfully cold.

Then at the top I stepped into a patch of dazzling light and it felt just marvelous, the warm sun on my cold cheek. I closed my eyes. The light and warmth penetrated my eyelids, so unexpected, so gentle, such a contrast to cold metal and shade. Was it a minute? Thirty seconds? I didn't stand there long, but it was long enough to begin to relax into the brightness. Finally I stepped across the landing towards the building, back through shade, and felt the temperature drop again what might have been fifteen degrees, back to a land of bracing oneself against the elements, rather than inviting them in, as I had a moment earlier.

Moving from sun to shade is so dramatic, especially in the height of summer, when the sun can feel like a relentless beast pushing down on you and the shade offers gentle respite. Now in this cold, dark season, the sunlight is a precious gift. The color of the whole day can change, depending on where you're standing.

Sometimes that's what grief is like. Frances calls it a grief attack, when you're tooling along as best you can, fairly steady, and suddenly you're knocked off your feet by acute sorrow. You're in the winter sun, doing just fine, letting your guard down, and then suddenly, without warning, find yourself in the shade, shivering.

As we approach Christmas, for me the grief is more like holding the sun and the darkness simultaneously, all the time. The warmer it gets, the colder it gets. The more delighted I am by the children and the more zany their holiday energy, the more devastated I am by Mike's absence. The more beautiful our tree, the more heartbreaking our tree. The more "normally" I am able to move through a day, the more alien I feel.

A few days ago I went out to our garage and used my very fussy elliptical trainer. It was procured by loving friends as a response to my perceived predicament back in early March - it seemed then that I would be bringing Mike home on hospice care, in charge of suctioning his tracheostomy and managing his feeding tube and basically continuing to live out our days in an increasingly intense and demanding caregiving role. I'm the kind of person - or at least through this experience I became the kind of person - who starts to lose any semblance of emotional balance if I can't sweat at least every couple of days. And it didn't seem like leaving the house would be in my future for quite awhile. Hence, a big beautiful piece of machinery was moved into my house while I was at the hospital with Mike, and now lives in the corner of my new garage.

Anyway. I had half an hour (a win), and the elliptical was working (another win), and I watched part of an episode of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Mike's iPad (yet another win, figuring out how to download a show in order to play it later, the kind of thing that was Mike's job, not mine), and it was funny. When I was done, fueled by a sparkling ripple of endorphins and good jokes, I did a little dance as I hopped off. I kept doing my funny happy dance on the way to the garage door, before I had to open it and start acting like a more sedate adult again in my urban, exposed backyard. With my hand on the doorknob, waiting for my hips to settle down, I suddenly had this thought: this is my garage. I bought this garage. This is my house!

I laughed out loud. It was the first time I felt that way - pride in having pulled it together and bought a house - a house with a garage! no way! - and happiness in my accomplishment and excitement over all I wanted to do to keep making it feel like our home.

A minute later I sobbed. The warmer it gets, the colder it gets. I told a friend about feeling that surprising rush of happiness later in the day, and cried again with her.

But I can take it. At least for today, I'm game. If I open myself up to joy, I know what comes with it. I know the deal. It's okay. Nothing is the same, there's no use in pretending. Nothing is just good. It is all bittersweet, not unlike those days when we teetered on the edge of the abyss of parenthood, holding hands.

As my new friend and I observed, once I finally made it inside and found her office, nothing is win-win anymore. It's either win-lose, or lose-lose. If you don't give yourself permission to register the wins, or make space for them, then it will be lose-lose all the time. Maybe a slightly muted, muffled, numb sort of lose, as compared to the win-lose lose, which really fucking hurts, but it's all lose all the same. Might as well go for the wins when you can.

neither toil nor spin

I went to visit the cemetery by myself today. The weather was perfect - as perfect as it can be in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on a late afternoon in November following one's return from a beachy family Thanksgiving in south Florida. The sun was bright and even though my hair was still wet from a slow Sunday shower and my jacket was light and I'm a total wimp about being cold I could comfortaby sit on the grass next to Mike's grave with nary a shiver.

As soon as I got there I spotted an incongruous ladybug crawling along the rim of his gravestone's birdbath. A sign! A lucky ladybug. A greeting. As I watched its arduous course along the stone lip, I realized that it was approaching a second ladybug. Oh Mike, I said. Did you send them? It's you and me! I think you sent them. Thank you.

Those ladybugs broadcast the particular tender welcome I often feel at the cemetery. Come, sit down, spend some time with us, with Mike, with the trees and birds and cornfield beyond. Look for more signs; you'll find them if you do. You belong here with us.

Sometimes I talk to Mike, but in the midst of a challenging day it usually takes the form of an exasperated yelp, a plea for assistance, a shout of pent up sorrow. I hear myself say his name aloud often: Mike. Depending on the situation, I might go so far as to say Mike, I don't know what to do. In bathroom stalls, in the car under my breath, in my office between clients, I say things like Mike, I'm a mess. Please help. 

But the only time and place I feel like I can really talk to him is at the cemetery, alone, where it's just us. What does that mean exactly? I couldn't say.

The thing is, I spend a lot of time feeling fretful about how our lives are moving on, how I make large and small decisions all by myself now, how the kids are learning to manage life with one living parent. The future keeps unfolding. Is he still with me? Am I doing the work of taking Mike with us? How do I keep him close - feel his difficulty, his difference, his power - when in the blur of a regular grief-cast Tuesday with a job and three children it's hard enough to make space for my own thoughts and feelings, let alone his?

So the comfort I feel at the cemetery is profound. I don't know if I'm doing anything right. I don't know if I'm honoring Mike in my day to day life choices (though I pray I am), I don't know how to keep leaning into this strange widowed parenting future. But to see those ladybugs, the drifting clouds overhead, the crows lifting en masse from the bare branches of the tree into the bright sky, the beautiful headstone full of clean cold rainwater, to feel a resistance-less sinking into sadness and connection?  Being there, part of me (Mike?) whispers that it doesn't matter if I'm fucking everything up. There's no doing it right. There's only showing up, arriving, again and again, broken and smiling and crying, unmoored yet somehow staying in the harbor.

I like to talk out loud about everyday things to Mike at the cemetery. The kids (same old worries), updates on family and friends, things I've been reading or thinking about. Today I heard myself complaining about something - and then I hesitated, like, should I bring Mike this kind of crap? - and then I realized something. I don't have to worry about protecting him from anything. He doesn't feel agitated or judgemental or pissed off about small and basically unimportant things anymore.

Because how could he? He's made the passage, he has died to this version of life. Mike must see with transformed vision now. It hit me: Mike has changed, and I have too. I can't re-enter our relationship in the same way, because we have been forever transformed by his death.

Later I told him I'd been feeling old, unattractive. Worried about my sad and achey body. I quickly added that I know, I know, he'd love a tired old aging body. Beats the alternative, as they say. You'd think after walking our path together I'd be all gratitude and light, all cured of any residual body image fretting, immune to the tyrannical consumerist wellness culture that Mike found mildly oppressive as a healthy person and acutely oppressive as a cancer patient. But here I am, without his ballast in my ship, sending an embarrasing amount of money to artisanal organic skincare companies and debating how to handle my thinning and increasingly graying hair.

Again, at first I confessed these worries to Mike with embarrassment, with anticipation of his exasperated response. But a minute later, again I realized he wasn't exasperated at all. Mike is a new, unknowable being, but I do know that in dying he let go of many things. So much fell away in the process, all the small irritations and judgements, the insecurities and fears, the leftover anger and worries. The spaces left behind gradually filled with love, even though he was frightened and suffering.

How could the person I held as he passed into death possibly care if his wife dyes her hair, or doesn't dye her hair, or worries about dyeing her hair?

At the cemetery I told him I felt bad about how I looked; in time I knew his only response was tender compassion.

Later in the evening I took the children to try out a contemplative mass at our new church. I was nervous, worried that it would be a lot of serious, silent adults annoyed by the presence of whispering children. Well, maybe they were - I don't know. But we did it. The gospel portion of the service was lectio divina, a practice of close, contemplative listening/reading to a short passage of the Bible. Mike often used this approach to prayer. Father Leo, the Catholic priest who did Mike's service, encouraged me to try it in the panicky sleepless weeks after Mike died. (I did, though couldn't stick with it).

Not surprisingly, we listened - three or four times - to Matthew: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

They neither toil nor spin. This phrase stayed with me.

Neither toil nor spin, Meagan. I looked up at the illuminated painting of Jesus on the cross in the chapel as I stroked Beatrice's hair, her head resting on my lap, feeling grateful for her patience in this strange silent room, and for the first time it occured to me: Jesus had to go through the dying process, too. He was also human, and knew he would die, and had to say goodbye and let go of his concerns about things like what would happen to his disciples and his mother, to Judas, whether or not he had completed his work, what he would eat and wear tomorrow. Dying is becoming like the lilies of the field.

We are all dying, all the time, but only those who are facing their death in a visceral and true way know what it is to be stripped of all the unimportant worries and preoccupations that tether us to yesterday, today, tomorrow.

Jesus died for our sins is a slogan that has always left me cold. What does it even mean? How can it provide any comfort? I hear that sentence and I think, please, Jesus, don't do me any favors. Don't put this on me. But something about connecting Jesus's experience on the cross tonight with Mike's experience in the hospital opened a space in my heart. God became flesh, and He didn't just die - because no one just dies - he went through the process of suffering, of dying. He became like the lilies, like the ladybugs, stripped of worry, of anxious busy-ness, all presence, all fullness. All love.

Does it sound too tidy? I guess it is. It's so hard to put language on some of this disoriented, light emanating from around a dark corner I cannot quite see, sorrow-laden stuff.

I realized today that I cannot be inside my old relationship with Mike, I cannot carry that forward, because it died when he did. He was transformed, and in a smaller way, I was too. What I feel grateful for is the peace this realization brought with it. I don't know who I am, or who he is, or who we are now that he has died. But miraculously, tonight anyway, I don't feel anxious. If Jesus could approach and pass through this terrifying door alongside us, then maybe it's okay to not have a clue.

Neither toil nor spin. At first I heard Meagan, chill out, it's okay to leave some dishes in the sink, it's okay to let Beatrice watch crappy shows on Netflix while you get something done, it's okay if the kids forget to change their sheets. But then, in time, I heard it in a deeper way: Meagan, it's okay if you don't know what to do. It's okay if you cry a lot today, and not at all tomorrow. It's okay if you're messing up life without Mike. Just keep showing up. Keep turning towards to sun.

Thanks, Jesus.

all saints

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
       a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
       of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
       the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
       the sheet that is spread over all nations;
       he will swallow up death forever.

That's the reading from Isaiah for today, the feast of All Saints. All Saints really does mean all the saints - all the holy ones that have come before us, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, still connected to us, still part of our story. I left a message on a random person named Debbie's voice mail around 11 pm last night, asking her to add my husband Michael's name to the list that will be read aloud on Sunday's All Souls service at our still-new church.

All Souls developed as a day to pray for all who have recently died, in order to expedite and support their passage through purgatory.

I do not, however, believe Mike is in purgatory.

(Incidentally, the warm and wonderful Catholic priest that knew and buried Mike told me after he died that he didn't believe Mike was in purgatory, either; he thought Mike had done the harrowing spiritual work required of him on earth, and was now fully in the presence of God).

(I took, and take, great comfort in that).

(I'm not sure if that qualifies him for recognition on All Saints or All Souls, or both. I vote for both.)

Well, I'm obviously unclear on the technicalities. But I want very much to pray for him in a holy place, and to hear his name read aloud in community.

In our Annapolis church we always had a New Orleans style jazz band play for All Souls Sunday. It was a raucous and sacred and fitting commemoration of those we loved whom we could no longer see and touch. I loved to remember and pray for and smile about and conjure my dad in the midst of that nearly unhinged, joyous music. We chose to have Beatrice baptized during that service, so that we could explicitly welcome her into a communion of saints that stretched before and behind her, to the misty horizon and beyond.

I don't know what to make of the vision in Isaiah. I am moved to awe, to fear by the voices in scripture that clearly name our hearts' deepest longings. It's scary to say just what you want. The risk hope requires is terrifying.

I do want more than anything for God to wipe away the tears from all our faces. I want the heavy shroud cast over me to be lifted, light and gauzy, and to watch it float away. I long for the sheet that seems to have darkened and closed in over all the nations, and most especially and tragically over our nation, to billow up on a fresh, cold breeze and resettle in a harmless pile at the foot of the bed. I want Mike to be basking in God's brilliant presence right now.

And I want him to, as he fully believed he would, be resurrected. To walk in glory in the communion of saints. To sing and play baseball and hold his children and behold the sunlight shining through the golden leaves on the first day of November - all of it made new, all of it more miraculous than we now know it to be.

I don't have his faith. I have a yearning for his faith. Or rather, I have a yearning for a faith that might be my own. Spiritual restlessness was always his bag. There wasn't much room for my own longing for transcendence and clarity, which were always distinctive from his. Maybe I could have made that space for myself, but I never really did. Instead I tried to clear a path for him.

So here I am, closing in on eight months of widowhood, fumbling to balance the comfort things like a passage in Isaiah read early in the morning on All Saints Day brings me - simply because it is Mike's, because I know he loved it - with my own growing hope that I can hold that connection to him while making more space for my own path to emerge.

The things is, I still feel like the most important thing about me is that Mike died. I still can't feel comfortable socially unless everyone around me knows - and accepts - that I might start crying at any moment, because everything refers back to that brutal reality I'm living. Anything of note - be it beautiful, happy, sad, hilarious, insightful, smart, poignant, tragic, enraging, triumphant, disastrous - brings his absence into even sharper relief. He's not here for it. 

I use the word widow at least six or seven times a day. I want to. I want to acknowledge that I have become a new kind of person and I can never go back. There's a special word for it, and I claim it. It's not unlike becoming a parent. You have no idea how you will be transformed forever when you move past that irreversible boundary, only that you will be. Things can never be the same again. Crossing into widowhood is the only other transformation I've experienced that comes close to the changed-forever quality of crossing into parenthood. I know the intensity of the pain will lessen eventually with time, but the deep knowing of what it is to lose my beloved partner will never leave me.

So it's weird. An essential part of my identity has changed forever. I am not the person I was the moment Mike died in my arms because Mike died in my arms. But I don't want to be different, because I want to be able to feel Mike with me, as he was, as I was, as we were. I dreamed last night that he walked into the new house and was angry with me about everything, just everything, going from room to room, taking stock of all the frustrating arrangements and messes and new items. In the dream I thought - you've wanted him to come back more than anything, and now he's here, and look what's happened!

I must be afraid of all the changing that threatens to pull me even further away from my beloved. But it's such a set up. How can anything be the same? The very structure of this grief has marked me, marked us and transformed us in suffering and the struggle to find a new way to be a family.

I need to trust Mike's wisdom. I need to find a way to touch his profound love for us. He knew I'd be changed forever in widowhood. He probably knew I'd need to strike out on my own spiritual path, too. He has made his own passage, and even though my faith flickers and sputters like a nearly burned down tealight nestled in a pumpkin at the sticky overtired end of the night I do believe Mike must now see with some of God's own vision, which can only be love, which can only encompass and forgive and protect us, and can never begrudge things like an outdoor table poorly spray painted aqua and hastily sought nose piercings and take out pizza yet again and other questionable choices I've made since he died.

I'm a widow. Love is stronger than death. Amen.


     

goodbye to uncomplicated joy

When you take care of someone you love for a very long time, the world narrows. There's a distillation of your experience, a falling away of everyday things, and the world outside becomes another place - a place you no longer live. A place where people go to work and school and exercise class, vacations and concerts and parties; a place where people complain about roof repairs and back pain, ornery children and stubborn spouses; a place where people eat, drink, speak, and breathe easily, without a second thought. I took care of Mike in our own vivid and harrowing world for so long. It was soaked through with the pain of love, and the vision that love grants, so much so that I could often only participate for brief moments - I had to maintain my ability to function and so usually hovered at the periphery, while Mike in his profound courage remained open to grief - and grace - much of the time.

How often did I glance at him while the children were having fun, laughing over something absurd at dinner or watching a funny movie, and see tears in his eyes? He was already walking the path that was waiting for me. I now cannot see the end of it, let alone any variation in its rocky terrain.

I often sought distractions when we were traveling to Philadelphia or New York for treatment, or during endless waits in exam rooms. I always brought a book. I liked to listen to an audio book on our drives (the same one for months, Kristin Lavransdatter; I loved it but now am terrified by the idea of picking up where we left off). I would arrange child care or update family and friends via text in waiting rooms, or while we sat in the emergency department waiting for Mike to be admitted. Sometimes he napped; sometimes he was too feverish or uncomfortable to focus anyway. But usually he preferred to sit quietly and wait. If anything, he'd review notes and questions we had for the doctor. Once I asked why he seemed annoyed with me for reading a magazine - and honestly, the plentiful glossy magazines at the cancer institute got me through those first months of chemo and radiation; they were soothing, shiny reminders of the world outside that I then hoped was waiting for our return - and he told me that he would like it if we two could be shoulder to shoulder, holding hands, facing down the cancer beast all the time. That it seemed we were more likely to triumph if we spent all our available focus and energy staring it down, two warriors taut, poised, and ready on a battlefield, gazing at the horizon, waiting for signs of the enemy approach.

That's not a good way for me to cope with this day to day, I said. I need breaks, I said. I can't stay that vigilant; I'll fall apart.

I know, he said. I know you can't do that. I just wish you could sometimes.

Now I feel a pit of guilt when I think of that conversation, and of how little undistracted, focused time I gave Mike. I know I did the best I could. But I wish I could have done better.

I had to keep one unsteady foot in the outside world, where our children went to school and sports practice and music lessons, and where I sometimes worked. But Mike really did spend most of his time in the battlefield/monastery/hospital. His reality was the real, saturated, painful, heart-filled center of my life. Even though he did most of the emotional heavy-lifting, we both saw life as achingly precious, all the time, because it was so constantly threatened. We felt the fragility of sweetness: the adorable linguistic accidents that come with being three, a phrase played on the piano for the twentieth time, a fluttering bird at the feeder. All of it was so crushingly beautiful. During the brief times Mike could enjoy a spell of better health, he would sometimes get frustrated by how quickly he lost that cracked-openness to life's excruciating beauty. But Mike, I'd say. It's hard to live like that all the time.

Once we were talking about his probable death, in one of the rare times we were alone and I allowed myself to walk into that grief-space with him. I was sitting at the kitchen table and he was standing nearby in a flannel robe, pulling out his meds from the cabinet. In a fit of sorrow and despair, I blurted that if he died, I would live my life for the children. I would be for them. They would be my reason. He didn't need to worry; I'd take care of them. Because what else would I have?

And now I do live for them, it's true. But sometimes, surprisingly, I also feel the tug of my own unfolding being. I feel my own self asking for my attention and care.

But it's terrifying to want things just for me. Living my own life means actively signing onto a life without Mike. How can I want to keep putting one foot in front of the other, forging ahead, knowing Mike isn't alive here with me?

But I do. I want wonderful meals, and friends new and old, and fantasy yoga retreats, and good books and movies and music, and October hikes, and generous glasses of wine. Some of these are things I would not pursue with my husband, because he wouldn't enjoy them. Some he would absolutely love. Some are things I want because he died and I feel an urgent need to tend to my bottomless grief. In any case, the wanting them, and the doing them, are all colored by the loss of him.

Everything shines brighter, more ragged and raw, through the eyes of grief. Everything from my morning coffee (he would shudder to see how sloppily I make it) to the disappointing session at work (I can't tell him about it) to the unbelievably difficult and stressful house-selling process that was supposed to end at settlement this past Friday and is still unresolved (he would be screaming - throat cancer or no - to the powers that be at the title company and realty firms).

I can't join the outside world after all, because I still live outside it. Once I spent my days in the intensity of caregiving and medical management and parenting with a gravely ill partner; now I live in the pure, searing intensity of mourning.

Nights are terrible. I can't give up and go to sleep - I seem to be waiting for something to change. Waiting to end the day differently, somehow. Waiting for Mike, I guess. Mornings are equally bad. Seven months later, waking up in the still darkness without my husband is a real bitch. But a lot happens in between these sorrowful bookends. They frame and put into relief the miraculous nature of creation that reliably shines into my days. Colors are more vivid; feelings more powerful; autumn's beauty tears through me with a relentlessness that seems almost cruel. That light! That golden late afternoon light illuminating the bricks and tree limbs of downtown Lancaster. It hurts me. 

We're in a new house that Mike never shared with us. We're creating new routines. We're trying to be honest about asking for the support we need and we're trying to receive it graciously. We fight and cry a lot. We're basically fumbling around in what some people have called "our new normal." Good God, do I hate that phrase. There is nothing normal about this.

Yet there are many good and true and beautiful things in our lives, and I open my arms to them knowing that the pain will twist and pinch even more. Every joyful thing must be greeted in the light of my love's absence.

I cannot say no to joy; nor can I ever feel it with the pure simplicity I once did.

Mike died, and nothing will ever be the same. How could it be? And yet I miss the irretrievable, normal, outside world - and our place in it - so very much.

my life is too hard for me today

Here's what I want to do: rant.

Swear and rant. Rant and swear. Fuckety fuck fuck.

I want to tell you about my too-hard day, my too-hard week. I do recognize that people in Florida have lost their homes, that Brett Kavanaugh is now a Supreme Court justice, that there are families in my city that don't have enough to eat tonight. I know. It's just that I'm having a Melania moment. I hear she is the most bullied person in the world. Yes. Exactly. And I, it turns out, am having the hardest week in the world.

It started with my final visit to our house in Annapolis, the last place Mike was well, the last place I lived in which I didn't have to ask friends for help every other day. I was collecting the last pieces of furniture before the settlement next week. I asked three friends to help me on the driving/loading side, and three more friends to help me back in Lancaster on the unloading side. I found a picture of Gabriel, aged three, in his Halloween costume in the garage. I found the hand weights Mike got for his thirteenth birthday. I said goodbye to the house.

It was a challenge to fit everything into our new place, which continues to feature chaotic disaster zones that are beginning to make my skin crawl. If I leave a box full of the contents of Frances's desk when she was nine in the corner of the kitchen, it remains in the corner of the kitchen. If anything, it grows, as other things are gradually placed on top of it because there is nowhere else to put them, things like a basket of scarves, a box of framed pictures, and Mike's old Latin textbooks. Because I am the only person who will ever move them. Because this big pile of bricks filled to capacity with stuff is my responsibility. People occasionally see me and say, congratulations on your new house! And I say ...huh?

And then they cheerily say, so how's the move going? Are you all settled in?

And I say, well ... no. No I'm not. And I want to add that it's unsettling as hell to live in a jumbled museum of our family's history where nothing seems to have a proper place yet, where reminders of the life we used to live are everywhere. No object has become part of the landscape yet, so all of it retains its power to recall past times and places with a vividness that scrapes at my insides. The Freiman Stolzfus print I gave to Mike for Christmas six years ago is resting on my old dresser, propped next to the Fra Angelico Anunciation that I hung opposite Mike's bed in our last house while he was hospitalized at Penn last December for his stem cell transplant. It was part of my Christmas present for him: making our bedroom a more beautiful place in which he might convalesce. I remembered how he loved that image, how we both did, when we visited San Marco in Florence during our extended traveling honeymoon. Two small images lean against a white wall opposite my too-big empty bed, but they stir up many stories: everything from our honeymoon to a Christmas years ago when Mike was healthy and Beatrice was growing inside me to the torment of Mike's near-month in the hospital and all the emergency rides back and forth between Lancaster and Philadelphia to the site of the Anunciation hanging above Mike while he sat in the orange chair and I set up the IV tubing on the floor at his feet every afternoon, leaning my head against his bony knee while I primed the pump.

So this move is just killing me. I am brittle and short-tempered with the kids, who are less independent than usual because they don't know where anything is or how anything works. My patience has bowed and broken under the weight of all these damn boxes. I repeat phrases with increasing irritation and volume to the disoriented children as if they were tourists who didn't speak the language and I a rude native.

The guitar picks are on the blue shelf. The BLUE shelf. They're on the BLUE SHELF. The BLUE SHELF. THE BLUE SHELF NEXT TO THE PIANO.

Finally a bewildered Gabriel will ask, but which blue shelf?

All I can muster is one more useless bellow. THE BLUE SHELF NEXT TO THE PIANO.

I harangue them; they protest. They don't want to do chores; they don't want to practice their instruments; they don't like it when I come home from work; they don't like it when I go to work. They don't like it when I cry. They don't like it when I make whole wheat pasta for dinner, when I ask them to scoop the kitty litter, when I get mad that they still haven't taken the books on the stairs up to their rooms. Beatrice doesn't like it when I have to interrupt bedtime reading in order to help Frances find a new place to plug in the keyboard because the piano tuner hasn't called me back and she needs to practice. Gabriel doesn't like it when I make him come home from his best friends' house, where he'd much rather live, because their parents are nice and fun. They don't like it when I'm texting when they want to talk to me. No one likes it when I ask one kid to stop talking so I can hear what the other one is saying. No one likes it when their homework was left outside in the rain and is all smeary and ruined and all I do is calmly suggest seeking out a hair dryer. When I asked Beatrice if she would please take out napkins and put them on the table before dinner tonight she said no.

Beatrice. Please put them on the table.

And do you know what she said then? My loose-toothed, dirty-footed, book-loving, Abba-singing kindergartener, while rolling her gorgeous blue eyes with adolescent flair?

Oh fine. Fine, Mama.

Sometimes people tell me my kids will look back and admire me for all this. That they will see what we went through and how I took care of their Papa and them and they will really, truly appreciate how hard it was. They'll see how much I loved them and love them still.

But I don't know. I fear I am not being the mama they need right now; why would they look back with admiration? I fear they will resent me. Stay mad. Because what if I stay sad? Having a dead Papa and a sad Mama is no good way to live, especially when you're a kid.

I'm sad and I'm stretched thin. I go to work and wash the dishes and feed the cats and arrange transportation to lessons and look for all the paid house-related receipts to scan and send to my realtor in advance of the closing next week and pay the bills and wash Beatrice's hair and lock the doors at night. It's so fucking hard.

I can't be all the things they want. I don't even know if I can be all the things they need. I wish Mike were here.

libraries on planet widow

After work on Friday I closed on our new house. On Saturday, with the help of strong friends, we moved everything from the house we were renting to the new one. On Sunday, I met movers bright and early at a storage unit where everything from Annapolis has been patiently waiting for me and spent the morning and early afternoon directing them. They kept bringing things in the open front door, and I kept feeling waves of surprise and delight to be reunited with so many old friends: oh, the crazy quilt is here! the piano! the beautiful shelves!

And the books. Boxes upon boxes, stacks upon stacks. Mike's office on campus, his home office, and years of acquisitive impulses that went unchecked in used bookstores everywhere we lived were spread before me. It was impossible to walk in the room where I kept directing the movers to deposit them all.

The more I unpack, the more there seems to be, sliding in small hills and stacks all over the floor, and tucked in between them are Mike's notebooks. He nearly always kept an intellectual journal, which sometimes served as a personal spiritual journal too. Rather, his philosophical passions seemed to be expressions that sprang from a bottomless well of spiritual yearning. Mike journaled to work out things like his intellectual development in relationship to figures in Continental philosophy, the nature of his belief in God, what exactly Thomas Aquinas was getting at in a particular subsection of the Summa Theologia. In another time and place he'd have made an exquisite Talmudic scholar. He had a restlessness for the truth that propelled him through stacks of notebooks. The very slant of his handwriting suggests urgency.

And now I have them all. So I shelve three books, and then I open a notebook, scanning for something personal, something about me. Did I figure in his imagination? Did our daily life together touch any part of his thinking life? There are a few passing references, but not much. Flipping through the notebooks stirs up feelings about a pattern in our relationship that at times left me feeling uncomfortably like a demanding child. I'd look to him for recognition; he'd look to his books.

So I'm feeling all those feelings. And I'm finding the book of Emily Dickinson poems I gave him, and  the Lorrie Moore short stories we both loved, and the set of Narnia books my grandfather gave me in the second grade that Mike read aloud to Frances and then Gabriel. And then another peek in a notebook. Still obsessively single-minded about the nature of God, the universe, and your relationship to it all? Yep. Okay, just checking. And then back to the books, taking a few to the front porch for passersby to take, setting some aside to move to the children's bedrooms, picking them up, putting them down again, tripping over a pile, stroking a cat's ears, picking up another notebook - basically making little to no progress at all and spending the last moments of the portion of my day off from work while the children were still at school doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.

Then they came home. I told them to quickly get themselves a snack, not even looking up from a Thomas Merton book that Mike had penciled notes in, because it was almost time to go.

Oh no Mama. Don't make us. We won't do it. Why, why?

Because we're just going to try it, I mumbled, still picking up and putting down books in piles at my feet.

But a support group?? We already have a support group. It's called all our friends and family. Everyone who loves us. AND SUPPORTS US!

Well, this is different. And it's just an assessment, to learn more about the group and for the people who run the group to learn more about you. We're going to see what it's like.

And so I gathered my groaning children into the car to be assessed for the Coping Kids and Teens bereavement support group at the Pathways Center for Grief and Loss that is housed in the same buidling as the inpatient hospice that we made plans to transport Mike to the very morning that he died.

We were ushered into a library space to wait for the counselors and encouraged to peruse and if we wanted, check out one of the books. The impersonal "peaceful" music playing, the hum of the air conditioning, the quiet halls, the tasteful furniture - the combined effect set the four of us on edge. Of course I tried not to show it. Each child reluctantly took a turn speaking privately with a counselor and so I spent over an hour and a half in the library, glancing over all those spines and the neat labels below each section: Children's - Religious, Loss of a Pet, Illness and Loss, Caregiving and Grief.

This was not my library. These were not my books. I was afflicted by the strangest sense of disorientation. What the hell was I doing in this hushed room full of books with titles like Planet Widow while my children were being evaluated for placement in a bereavement support group? Did Mike die or something? Did any of this 'nice nice' stuff, as Gabriel might call it, have anything to do with me, with my family, with my reality? Whose idea was it to come here anyway?

While Mike was sick, he and I sometimes acknowledged - no, confessed - how uninterested we were in fundraising efforts like Relay for Life, encouraging friends to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, or identifying in any way as a cancer patient. What did that even mean? We suspected it was pride getting in our way. Mike's disease was rare, our experience was unusual - our situation was different. How could the word cancer somehow communicate something essential about Mike or our family? We didn't want cancer support groups, or to hear other people's stories about their uncle's triumphant ten year battle with colon cancer, or to read books about how to help kids cope with cancer. We just wanted to muscle through it in our own way.

Was that hubris? I don't know. Would Mike be on the kids' side (and truth be told, my own private, fearful side) with the whole grief support group thing? I don't know that either. Probably not. He'd want them to know they weren't alone. He'd want them to be given the space to mourn in their own way, apart from the pressures of school and family and incredibly stressful house-moving. I know that.

Sometimes when I find myself and the children in social situations that are stretching our limits (and that I, of course, have pushed us into), I let Mike's spirit come to me. I can almost hear him say, as he so often did in life: Meagan. Let's get the rock out of here. And that's how I know it's fine to leave. It's fine to walk right out of Vacation Bible School with Beatrice, six minutes after signing her up. It's fine to leave a party early. It's fine to get ready for and then decide against attending a school function. I don't always do it, but I know I can, thanks to Mike.

Mike didn't suggest we split while I was waiting in that grief library. I noticed. I'm not sure if we'll do the group yet, but I think I'm glad we went today.

It's good to try. And it's good to know you can leave.

And it's really good to come home to your books. All of them.

winter in fall

We're moving on Saturday. It'll be the fourth one in fewer than three years, and you'd think by now I'd be used to the whole upheaval business. But this process has been harder for me in every way. It really began back in April, when I had to begin clearing out our old house in Annapolis for sale (which will finally - fingers crossed and pleading eyes cast heavenward - close later in October). Every step has asked me to confront the fact of Mike's death, and consider the artifacts of our family history, deciding over and over again: keep it? goodwill it? cry over it, throw it away?

Yesterday faithful friends came over to help pack in anticipation of the move, and I found the Red Stroller in the basement. It was a gift from Mike's parents when Frances was born and subsequently wheeled by me and Mike over countless miles. We navigated it over bumpy sidewalks, boosted it up and over the side of tall curbs, slid it through patches of slushy melting snow, lifted it together up porch steps and pushed it around gnarled roots. We cajoled and distracted babies into submitting to its black vinyl straps. We showed grandparents and friends how to kick the bottom just so, in order to coax it into the folded position. Its mesh fabric base held beer bottles that clinked cheerfully on our way to the neighbors' for tacos, and cantelopes and eggs on the long uphill walk home from market, and library books to return as we wended our slow way down S. Cherry Grove, chatting with neighbors and inevitably stashing a tricycle behind a bush when its rider tired and opted to walk. The Red Stroller transported all three children for at least two or three years apiece.

Now an unsettling spray of gray pinpoints of mold is spreading in its folded hood. Its original rider is a teenager. There will be no more babies; there's no reason to carry it into a new basement. It's time to say goodbye.

I saw the unexpected splash of faded red next to the trash bins out of my bathroom window while I brushed my teeth this morning and felt the heaviness of time passing settle over me like a leaden shawl.

It's strange to think that part of why I can experience the sadness of change like this is that Mike - who felt things so deeply, and had a real penchant for nostalgia - isn't here. A stroller going out with the trash is the kind of thing that would bring a tear to his eye if he happened to notice it in front of someone else's house. Someone he didn't even know. One of his most vivid childhood memories was the sight of another little girl en route to school who wobbled on her bike in such a way that her metal lunchbox flew open and a single perfect chocolate cupcake fell out, slowly yet insistently rolling right on down the street until it finally landed frosting-down in the gutter.

Oh, the poignancy of that lost cupcake! The look on the little girl's face! It was hers, hers to anticipate with pleasure all morning and to devour at lunch in front of all her envious friends, until a bump in the sidewalk intervened and she lost it all. Mike felt it slip through her fingers right along with her. It was so sad.

And so I would take on the steady, practical, present- and future-looking role at times of change, knowing how Mike would linger in the sadness of moves, new schools, growing children. I'd hold his hand and say, kindergarten will be amazing! Or, our new house is going to be beautiful, you'll see. Or, we don't know if this cancer will kill you, we can't know that, so let's try to enjoy the day that we do have, and hopefully tomorrow too.

Now he isn't here to protect me from my own feelings of sorrow, and my own desire to look back at what was. To really dig in to my memories, and take account of all we have lost. Thus unmoored, I stare out the window at our family's stroller while I still can, before the garbage truck rolls by in the darkness early tomorrow morning to take it away, along with so many other neglected pieces of other people's histories.

We went to a party on Saturday. A truly fun party, an annual outdoor neighborly fall party that stretches across backyards and typically features many friends, acquaintances, and people I don't know but would probably like if I did. I wanted to go because I wanted to feel like the old me - someone who enjoys the spark and fizz of a social gathering, the energy that registers with good conversation, deepening connection, and unexpected meetings. Someone who likes good food and drink, and the feeling of possibility that an evening-long unique community generates.

But I keep forgetting that I'm not the same person anymore. I'm me, but I'm me in winter. I'm me in mourning. It's so, so hard to be in the company of people who don't know that the most important thing about me is that Mike died. Or to be in mixed company, to be introduced by a friend who knows to a stranger who doesn't know. I feel dishonest if I don't somehow share that my husband died from the outset.

As in, you should know I am not someone who can keep up light banter for more than a minute or two. You should know I'm not really capable of surface-level interaction. If you want to talk, we're going to have to get down to business and it's not going to be easy. You'll apologize and feel flustered that you somehow "made" me talk about my grief, and I'll apologize that you innocently started with hi nice to meet you, how are you and ended moments later with this piece of raw, barely-guarded vulnerability.

I should wear a sign around my neck:

Grieving Widow

Cries Frequently, Brings up Loss, Has a Penchant for Dark Humor

Approach at Your Own Risk

Because really, some people would decline to engage in light chatter with me about the fall weather or the super delicious salad or the wild pack of adorable children hitting the dessert table with abandon if they knew, and I wouldn't blame them. Not everyone is comfortable with the pain I carry. I can see it in some people's eyes, an internal backing up, a little alarm system going off telling them to seek the nearest exit. I smell like danger, like the bad things that haven't happened to you but could. Don't get too close; you might somehow invite tragedy into your own life, or at the very least be asked to contend with the fragility of every precious person and thing. Keep your lunchbox lid on tight. Protect your cupcakes!

If I wore that sign, those people would know to give me a wide berth, and I would be spared the discomfort of sensing their flight.

Heck, I might avoid me in that sign. Some of us already have all we can manage for today.

So no. I don't have the springtime resiliency of the old me at a party. But I also don't have Mike. Just like I allowed him to really settle into his nostalgic feelings by providing some practical here-and-now balance, he allowed me to have another drink and enjoy a raucous conversation by keeping one eye on the door. My darling introvert. It was understood that I could go ahead and enjoy myself as long as I was attuned, as the evening wore on, to the moment when he was utterly maxed out and it was time to go. I could always feel Mike's eyes on me, and I confess I'd sometimes delay the moment I looked for him across the room to meet his and respond: yes, okay, I see you, I'll wrap this up in a few moments and get my coat. In desperate times he'd interrupt and do something socially graceful, like smile his handsome smile at my interlocutor and apologetically remind me that our babysitter had to get home by eleven. Oh yes. You're right. We'd better go.

When we first lived together in New York, at a sweet event for a new book my then-boss Dave wrote, I was chatting with various people and feeling very fizzy with all the excitement around him, enjoying my proximity to it all, feeling very grown up and yet feeling very young and full of potential. Mike was waiting patiently for me at the edge of the gathering. Finally I got my things and we walked out into the cool air, heading for the subway. Meagan, he said. You're an arm-toucher. I can't believe I fell in love with an arm-toucher.

It was true. I'd never noticed before. I definitely touch people's arms when I talk to them.

It was kind of like when I realized Mike was a passionate sports fan. Huh? You? I'm living with someone who yells at the TV?

We learn these things, and we somehow make new spaces, new allowances. There are negotiations. Ideally, it all shakes out into a mutually-beneficial albeit precarious balance.

I've been living inside of that dance since I was twenty years old. And now? Do I like parties without someone to tell me when it's time to go? Do I barely tolerate sports on TV when there is no one to watch? Do I resist crying over cupcakes, or do I sit down and sob?

It is winter, and snow covers all the paths. Oh, Mike. I cannot fathom what spring will bring.

broken and breathing

One morning, some years ago, I woke up with a terrible pinch beneath my right shoulder blade; a weird nerve pain that flared hot whenever I turned my head. Moving like a robot and wincing every so often, I somehow managed to drop baby Beatrice at her sitter's and little Gabriel at the bus stop and make it on time to a staff meeting at work. I was sitting very still in a chair waiting for everyone to assemble, grateful to not have to move, when Bernadette, one of the other therapists at the student counseling service, asked what was wrong. I looked like I was holding my breath, she said.

Well, I guess I am, I explained. When I take a deep breath I can feel this awful pinched nerve in my back.

She was a psychiatric nurse and a practitioner of something called Healing Touch, and asked if she could help. Why not? So before the meeting got started, she spent a minute or two with her palms quietly placed on my shoulder blade.

Meagan, she said. When something hurts, it needs our attention. You need to breathe into this pain for it to resolve. Stop holding it. Breathe.

So I did. It hurt at first, and then, miraculously, it began to calm and relax. By the end of the day, I was moving just fine.

This past week has been hard. I've been managing the rocky sale of our old house, and collecting paperwork needed for the purchase of our new house - something that, among other things, required me to battle over many phone calls and many mixed messages with the bank holding our old mortgage, and eventually concede defeat, hire a lawyer, and submit paperwork at the county courthouse to become the official executrix of Mike's estate in order to fax them evidence that I am indeed she, and it is permissible to verify that I have been paying off a mortgage originally drawn up in Mike's name only. It wasn't so much the headache and expense of this task that I had hoped to avoid; it was the anguish of having to present his death certificate and will and brute reality of his death to impersonal clerks in a courthouse office. In the same room where three couples were waiting to process marriage licenses. Anguish isn't too strong a word. I started crying and couldn't stop, standing there at the brown formica countertop with my manila file of papers verifying that my husband was dead and trying to focus on writing out a check for $183.50 to cover the cost of creating something called a letter of administration. Then I went back to work to make my 2 pm appointment.

The next day, Saturday, I had a list of things I wanted to get done after Gabriel's soccer game: chores, packing, fixing the trail-a-bike so Beatrice and I could commute in the fresh fall air, groceries, phone calls. But the bike shop had attached the trail-a-bike to the wrong bike and the piece connecting it to the seat was full of shims I couldn't manage to pry out. I popped Bea in the car and ran back to have them fix it. I ran home. I realized that the old base of the baby seat was still on my bike, blocking the way to the hitch. I went through all the allen wrenches in the tool box. None fit the screws. I took a deep breath. Beatrice had been waiting all week for me to do this one thing. I called Teb. Could I come over and borrow some tools?

So Beatrice and I walked to Teb and Diana's. Annika and her friend Willow had planned a crafting afternoon with six other ten and eleven year old friends, and they were just trickling in, gathering around a table covered with tassels and embroidery thread and hot glue guns. Normally, this would be  a dreamy sight. But I felt intrusive, and burdensome, and the weight of the day - and the week, and the month, and the year - began to push inside me, all the way up to my eyeballs, and I knew I would cry.

Sheesh. What a time for it.

But Teb, emerging from the basement with a case of many allen wrenchs in his hands, saw me and sat me down right there in the middle of all the brewing fun and gave me his full attention. He squatted down next to me on his bum knee and let me cry and tell him about the pain of having to become the executrix of Mike's estate. The girls didn't seem to notice, or if they did they chose to ignore it. And after Teb had sat with me in that distress and grief, he suggested Beatrice stay for the big girl crafting, and that I do whatever I wanted to do, all by myself.

So I went on a long run, and went to the grocery store, and decided that was enough productivity for one day, and felt better.

Later Libby came over with her boys who had been playing with Gabriel. While all the kids played she sat with me at my kitchen table and listened as I shared various worries about my children - the things that bounce around in my mind, and rarely get articulated. The things I used to talk through with Mike. I felt that loss so keenly, noticing how I had so much to talk about, and so I cried some more, and she stayed with me. With her peaceful and loving presence she let me know it was perfectly fine to do so.

I was thinking about those moments yesterday morning while the children still slept and I gradually decided not to cajole and insist and fight them into going to our still-unknown and scary new church but rather use this Sunday for less emotionally demanding pursuits. In the quiet I was reading a Henri Nouwen book, Life of the Beloved, that a group of women from our old church and I decided to read together back in July. (Better late than never. We'll get to talking about it eventually.)

Still, my own pain in life has taught me that the first step to healing is not a step away from the pain, but a step towards it. When brokenness is, in fact, just as intimate a part of our being as our chosenness and our blessedness, we have to dare to overcome our fear and become familiar with it. Yes, we have to find the courage to embrace our own brokenness, to make our most feared enemy into a friend, and to claim it as an intimate companion. ... My own experience with anguish has been that facing it and living it through is the way to healing. But I cannot do that on my own. I need someone to keep me standing in it, to assure me that there is peace beyond anguish, life beyond death, and love beyond fear. 

The experience of grief can so often mimic depression; we bereaved feel a temptation to hide our suffering away - to cry in the shower, to wall it over with socially acceptable behaviors and gestures that do not, that cannot, come from our broken hearts but rather stem from an act of self-protective will. Play it cool until you can get home, get under the covers, all alone, that's where it's safe to suffer. And the sorrow of loss is, on the one hand, something one must endure - befriend - alone. In so many ways, it is a path that only I can walk.

But befriending one's brokenness (and aren't we all, in our own ways, in our own unique pain, called to move in this direction?) is a gesture I make while leaning on many loving arms. Left to my own devices, my pain would just turn in and in and in, and I would run to escape its unbearable weight, and that never ends well.

It is my community of friends and family that allows me to inhabit my pain. To breathe.

I told Teb, through tears, that I didn't want to go to court and file to become the executrix of Mike's estate because I didn't want Mike to not be alive anymore. I didn't want this. It hurts that I have this.

And he said, I know.

He didn't flinch, and he didn't offer me a drink or a snack, and he didn't say oh yes, but now you can finally move forward with this thing, it'll be fine you'll see, and he didn't say, oh look those girls could use my help with their beads, hold that thought, I'm off for another pair of needle nose pliers! Rather he kept me standing in it.

I wrote about our Coloradan river trip not too long ago, and how I wanted to find the courage to keep seeking out canyons. Now I see how my strong and loving friends, who are themselves not afraid of my pain, and even willing to be close enough to me to touch it and help hold it, to feel it with me, open up such sacred spaces all the time. In the momentary quiet of my kitchen, in the midst of a crafting party, in a busy cafe, on the front porch, their arms make sturdy mini-canyons in which my knees can buckle and my heart feel its brokenness all over again.

Nouwen also says I realize there is a mysterious link between our brokenness and our ability to give to each other. He writes of how our truest joy comes in the giving of ourselves to others - something we can only do when we have befriended our own pain. He likes food metaphors. Bread can only be given once it is broken. A meal is a time of vulnerability, of communion. One of my favorite cookbooks by Marion Cunningham includes a charming list of rules for breakfast. One of them (which I can't quote exactly, as I've already packed it) is to be polite, be kind, because everyone is defenseless at the breakfast table. I think that's true of all tables where we gather to give and receive and enjoy and look each other in the eyes. We're defenseless. That's why I love mealtimes. (And why resentful, angry dining companions are the stuff of excellent theatre and nightmare Thanksgiving memories).

Feeding and being fed seem to call forth something essential and joyful for me. That must be why I insisted on showing Libby a new cookbook my friend Sarah sent me just moments after my tears had slowed. I want to make you this, and this, and this. I want to give you a beautiful salad; I want to give you myself.

I pray that someday I can know, deep in my heart and bones and muscles, that I already had given myself to her, just as she had given herself to me. For those with the capacity and willingness to receive it, sharing our brokeness is a gift. A blessing. A deepening ripple of love moving outwards to touch countless others.


World without end.

bitter widow alert

I got into the car after yoga class this morning and caught a minute or two of the news at the top of the hour. Just breaking? The Matsumotos of Japan have been confirmed as the world's oldest living spouses. They've been married for eighty years. When asked the secret to her long marriage, Mrs. Matsumoto replied: patience. 

I rolled my eyes. No, Korva, I said aloud, steering my busted minivan down Mulberry Street in the already blazing heat. The secret is not dying.

As a therapist who has worked in campus counseling centers with students for years, and as the widow of a college professor, many colleagues and friends and I have often sighed together over what sometimes seems the squandered abundance of those fleeting college years. Youth is wasted on the young, we say, shaking our heads. If they only knew how lucky, how beautiful, how smart, how energetic, how funny, how capable, how young they were, young people would enjoy so much more about being nineteen.

But maybe sometimes, also, age is wasted on the old.

Once, in the thick of a very terrifying time with Mike's cancer, I was in the Y locker room and overheard two elderly women talking as they changed after using the pool. They were complaining of how long it took them to do anything, how going for a swim took up nearly the entire morning, all because of how old and slow they were. How irritating it was that their bodies protested and rebelled. How effortful it was to put on a bathing suit!

I resent it, said one. I do. And the other said, me too. And I stared at them, and thought to myself: get the fuck out. You get to be eighty years old. You get to be here. How can you resent your body that you have been blessed to live inside of all these years? Those arms that have hugged your loved ones, those legs that have carried you over thousands of miles, this form that propels you through water and then sits on a dripping locker room bench alongside your friend twice a week?

I have always hated upbeat celebrations of long marriages, of being ninety years old, of sitting at the same desk for forty years. Maybe the Matsumotos haven't talked to each other since their children went off to college. Maybe they were real assholes to their neighbhors. Maybe all they did was not die, and decline to divorce. Inertia is a real thing. It's usually easier to stay than to go. And if you keep doing the same thing long enough, and don't die, eventually you get a real big party.

But what about my mom, who has loved my dad since she was eighteen? Who would undoudtedly be married to him today, if cancer hadn't taken him from us when he was young and vital? Where's her party for being married and then widowed to the same man for forty-two years? Isn't her love also an act of endurance, of patience, of beauty? What's her secret?

And what would I give for eighty years with Mike! What a blessing that would be, to live and grow and age and die together, as the Matsumotos have and will do. I wouldn't decline to divorce Mike; I would keep working towards an ideal of loving him as he was, and allowing him to love me as I am. I would fight to stay connected to the twisting, tightening, loosening, chafing, supporting, powerful bond between us until I was one hundred and four years old.

Life isn't something that happens to you, my dad told me and my sister one day when he was in the hospital. It's something you work at. He wanted us to know that after he had died, when he couldn't be there to remind us not to opt for inertia and passivity, and not to blame external circumstances for our hesitation to choose the right thing. He wanted us both to take responsibility for our own life, to work at it and make it good.

When we ask Mrs. Matsumoto what's your secret what we really mean is tell us what to do so we won't die. Tell us what to do so we can live with someone we love who also won't die for eighty years, too. That question comes from our collective delusion; we like to think that we're in charge.

But it's not up to us. Not really. Not even very much at all. That's why it's annoying to celebrate longevity for longevity's sake as if it were an accomplishment. It suggests those that didn't live so long didn't try as hard, or as well. They fell short of the goal of mastering and managing their own lives. They didn't eat enough superfoods, or meditate for ten minutes daily, or write a list of everything they're grateful for each night, or walk 10,000 steps before bed, or hug their children enough.

It's cool that Mrs. Matsumoto is 100 years old, and still married to her husband, who is 108 years old. It's very cool. What might I say to her, instead of what's your secret? I might say: what great good fortune you have had, to be given so many years in which to become your self and live out a full life, and to be given so many years to to learn and grow and love together with your husband! What a beautiful gift you have been given - not a reward for being good, but an unearned, precious blessing. A very good gift. Tell us what that's like.

It is the spirit with which we accept our gifts that seems worth celebrating. I know that Mike graciously accepted his, with God's help, in a spirit of humility and love and gratitude before he died.

His life wasn't long. His life was extraordinary.

force of nature

About a month ago I was knee-deep in a cold brook with Beatrice. I had suggested midway through our week in Vermont that she take a bath as the fairies probably do, in a little magical waist-high pool below a large mossy stone. She was delighted, and threw off her dirty dress. Beatrice is nearly always quick to take advantage of opportunities to undress. When our friend Wesley, age six, came down the path from the meadow to join us, Bea asked if he wanted to take his clothes off and have a fairy bath too.

No thanks.

Instead Wesley suggested we build a dam a little ways downstream, so we picked our way over the slippery river stones and looked for more to pile up in a narrow passage of the brook to try and divert the water. It was a hushed, exactly-right kind of interlude, sheltered as we were by the green, branching trees overhead and the gentle ferns and steady rocks along the banks. I tried to ignore the part of my mind that was questioning the endeavor, bracing itself every time one of the children hoisted a very heavy stone and slid on his or her way to the dam, imagining crushed toes and tears and a perilous journey back up the hill for adult help. I just couldn't bare to stop their work. The energy was so peaceful and focused. Beatrice and Wesley, miniature collaborative engineers bent over piles of rocks, seemed even more lovable than usual.

When it was time to return to the meadow, we all stepped back to take a look at our work. The water was very determined, and though we had not stopped it, we had at least changed the way it was flowing around the stones, creating a new ripple. Look at that, I said. No matter how many stones we pile up, do you see how the water always finds a way?

Beatrice, resplendent and naked, stood looking down at the stones in the brook.

Just like Papa's cancer, she said.

How did she know that? All I could say was you're right, Beatrice. It is.

And it's just like grief, which surely also always finds a way. We traveled to Colorado this month, and the majority of our second and final week there was spent on the Green River with a group of extraordinary people. Wesley's papa Zac invited us to come on the trip the night of Mike's funeral. We were sitting side by side on the floor of my mother's dining room. After the hardest week imaginable together, I was bracing myself for his family's departure. He asked me with his characteristic calm and conviction. It seemed like a good idea, and I said yes. I didn't worry too much about it. I bought plane tickets, and told the children to trust me, they would love it.

As the trip approached, our anxiety started to mount. I drove myself crazy in the days before - packing up, preparing the house for our absence, setting up kitten care, plotting the air travel and car rental - so crazy that I in fact forgot many items I had purchased especially for the trip. I cried when I realized I'd left four sun hats at home. How many times had Zac said: don't worry too much about the other stuff; the only really important thing you need is a sun hat? But I did get my family onto the plane and through the Denver airport - before I realized all I'd forgotten -  and that alone made me feel like a superhero.

The first week in Colorado, spent in the company of supportive, trusted friends, was full of gentle adventures and comfortable social time in new, beautful places. The kids were happy, and thus increasingly opposed to the idea of driving into the middle of nowhere, getting into boats they did not know how to operate that would navigate through unknown rapids, joining a group of people that they'd never met before and who themselves were lifelong friends, and spending all our time with these stranger-Coloradans - depending on them - over five solid days in the most remote wilderness they'd ever experienced. The last leg of our journey to the river was over a hot, endless dirt road. As we bumped along through clouds of dust all three children begged me to turn around, to please reconsider, to not force them into a situation that would not, in fact, be good for them at all but would rather be a nightmare.

I kept my calm and reassured and teased and smiled in the rear view mirror but of course I too was thinking that I had been insane to agree to this. We would be a burden, we would be outsiders, we would be clueless, we would embarrass Zac and Edith. The children would fall apart and I would have to take care of them on very little sleep in a public way before so many tough, capable Colorado families. I would feel like that much more of a parenting failure.

But. I did not turn around. We made it. It was hot. Everyone else on the trip was also arriving, and they hugged and joked and began doing things in preparation for the trip that I didn't understand. I started crying about ten minutes after we arrived. I introduced myself to half the people on the trip (there were 23 total) while crying. We were camping at the place where we would put-in the next day, and I couldn't find anything in the dusty trunk: not tooth brushes, not water bottles, not a flashlight. It was getting dark.

I was so tired. I was tired of driving, of defending the rightness of this questionable journey, of meeting new people and having to remember how to behave like a more stable human than I in fact am. I had not been sleeping much the week prior. I had gotten sick the day before and began running a fever in the middle of the Alamosa Walmart while I looked for last minute supplies. Every new place we landed in brought on a fresh wave of tears (and this was true for every trip of the summer - every arrival, every greeting, every first hug was like flipping a grief switch - and come to think of it, an insomnia switch - for me). And now, this silent canyon, this wide river, these strangers in a strange environment? I was utterly overwhelmed.

The next day we got ready and settled onto the well-laden boats. I kept on crying, and not sleeping, and feeling periodic waves of pain because my husband was not there with us. If he had been alive, we would never have come. Even if he had been alive and healthy we would never have done it. He would have been the most vociferous and articulate anxiety-riddled naysayer on that endless dirt road. We would never have been invited. We were in that extraordinary place because Mike died, and that made it hurt too.

And I cried because I was scared. The river trip was like one last transitional adventure before the next chapter of our lives began, the time in which I am a widow, and my three children's father has died, and we press on and go about daily life without him. The time of his illness has past; the time of immediate heartache and disorientation is ebbing away, the family and friends are returning to their routines and so, presumably, are we - whatever those are. Now I am steering this ship alone, charged with creating some kind of life that is good and full for my children, despite our collective sorrow. How will I do it? I sat looking up at those ancient canyon walls thinking, I'm afraid. I'm lost. I'm sad beyond measure. I don't know if I can do this. Mike. Mike, how can I do this?

And sometimes I cried without thought, without reason, helpless before a tidal wave of feeling. The sleeplessness fed my deterioration, but the grief-pain seemed to keep me up at night. It was like being in the grip of a storm system.

Don't get me wrong; I also had calmer moments, and time to laugh, to talk to new, caring, and brave people who didn't flinch around my pain, to delight in the wild water battles on the river, to savor wonderful, well-planned meals, to sit, to read to Beatrice at night, to watch the stars (lots of time for sleepless star-gazing), to listen to the song of the canyon wren, to watch my kids get to know the other kids on the trip, to admire the skillfulness and strength of everyone around me, to swim and wade and be in the rushing river.

But by the fourth day, the fatigue and the feelings had left me a hollow wreck. I felt ill. At the lunch table, when asked to pass the mayo, I cried in response while fumbling for the wrong condiment and couldn't even speak. I was, in that moment, desperate and unable to think how I could make it through another day. So I was directed to a hammock, and fed, and cared for, and rocked and caressed like the tiny baby that I am, that is part of me, for a very long time. A wise and gentle woman on the trip mothered me and helped me to see that almost immediately after Mike died I had had to start dealing - preparing our house for sale, making arrangements, submitting death certificates, going back to work, caring for the kids, looking for a new house to buy, managing our summer travels, and I had not had a moment to breathe. I had been so busy and then I arrived in this canyon, the most vast and open and quiet space I ever had been, with many people to help care for my children. I had nowhere to be but here and nothing to do but this - and was it any surprise then that the emotional devastation hit me so hard? And could it be any other way? And wasn't I, in fact, brimming with gratitude to be able to feel like this, to be exactly where I should be, experiencing exactly what was mine to experience, with so much beauty and love to support me through it?

She had faith that I wasn't going crazy. I rested in her nurturing presence. I wanted to be there, with her, with the water, with the sky, with all those people whom I'd just met and with the people who had been a part of my heart for many years too.

I didn't sleep much that night either, but the next day I felt scoured out and peaceful. Able to enjoy the long day on the river before take out. Incidentally, I was on a boat that day with Beatrice and Wesley, my dam-builders, as well as Gabriel and Zac. The dream team. Best snacks, best games, best I'm-bored whines, best everything. The wilderrness within had been so harrowing; the wilderness without became more inviting and somehow milder once I had emerged from it.

(It helped that it was gently overcast, after days of blazing sun.)

This terrible grief path has taught me so much that would have been easier not to know. When wrested from your partner, your team-mate, your two-person system, one is forced to contend with herself. There is no one to push off of or agree with; no one to blame, look to, question, compromise with, care for. It's just me in here. Holy shit.

When I left all my duties behind, I discovered what lay beneath them. There is always so much to do; especially during Mike's illness, I felt I could not stop. Then I sometimes resented the ceaseless intensity of my pace. Now I have begun to see the other side - the refuge that doing so much has been, and surely will continue to be. When you aren't busy, the hurt rises and crests at the surface and it is a wild, powerful force.

I have been taking care of everyone else and helping to contain and hold their feelings for many years now. In the thick of cancer I said to friends more than once that there was no room for my own feelings. It was too bad, but I didn't think it could be any other way. Now that I am no longer managing a crisis, I think I have to intentionally make some room. I'm still a therapist parenting three recently bereaved children who is in the middle of selling and buying a house and preparing for the fourth move in four years but I think it is time for me to embrace that the courageous thing for me to do right now is to continue seeking canyons.

It would be so much easier to concern myself with everyone else's feelings and needs. And that's probably mostly what I'll do. Force of habit. But now I know that my own are inside too, waiting for a little space, waiting for me to find the courage to endure them. It's my responsibility to do that; I can't blame circumstance or other people or cancer or my children for making it impossible. It's my own work to do.