underwater life

A few years ago we spent a week along the peaceful shore of the bay in Lewes, Delaware with some of Mike's family. Soon after we arrived, we met a family on the quiet beach who explained to us with a hushed sense of delight that if you submerged your ears under the water at that very moment, you could hear dolphins calling to one another in their otherwordly language. 

It was true. You could hear them, quite distinctly. I would often float on my back, squinting up at the hot pale sky, and let my heavy head slip deeper under the surface to listen for the dolphins that week. They - and the water, such a mysterious and effective conductor of sound - didn't disappoint. 

Lately I've been taking baths before I go to bed. I like the water to be as hot as I can stand. It's been very hard for me to sleep, and something about being almost intolerably hot before I get under the covers helps. Last night I flipped onto my belly and rested my cheek against the cool white slope of the tub, and my ear slipped into the bath. Suddenly I could hear the weird sound the house's HVAC system makes. I could hear my own stomach doing something strange and disturbing with my last meal. I could hear a neighbor's footsteps on the other side of the wall. Everything changes under water; it's louder, echoing. Sound acquires a kind of weight.

My days, and nights, bring such moments of elemental shift – the feeling of going underwater, going underground. I haven't spent this many days away from Mike since the day I saw him walk into the Olde Club at Swarthmore on February 13, 1998, leaving a conversation mid-sentence to get a closer look at him, so handsome and elegant and confident in his trim black pea coat. Three days later we kissed in the Crum Woods. Three days before that Neutral Milk Hotel had released our favorite album of all time. (A test of our absurd consuming early passion: we skipped their show - happening a seven minute walk away - because we couldn't bring ourselves to get out of my bed. We shared head-shaking, eye-rolling, laughing regret at that dumb-love decision in later years.)

Four days later he went back to Brooklyn. Seven days later I was dropped off in lower Manhattan by a friend and called him from a pay phone. Three weeks later I followed through on previously planned week-long trip to Spain (after desperately and rudely trying to get out of it, so dismayed by the thought of an ocean being between us) and Mike met me at the airport upon my return with a bunch of yellow tulips in hand. We rode the train back to his apartment and talked about philosophy graduate school, and possibly going for a masters in Cambridge first, and maybe he or maybe we could live in England for a year? I remember that talk vividly, standing in the subway, hanging onto the overhead bar not so much for help with the swaying train, but rather to prevent my knees from buckling under the waves of intense emotion, sparkling visions of possible futures before my eyes, Mike in my favorite black and gray sweater, holding those bright flowers, because it was all infused with a thrill - are you really here with me? Are we on a train hurtling through New York? Are we talking about tying our futures up together so soon? Is this even real?

I have thought and thought, and I am sure we never spent more than a week apart. We rarely spent more than a day or two apart.  

Now it's been seventeen days, and death - so much more terrible and silent than an ocean - is what separates us.

And I do the things I have to do, and even things I want to do. I pick up the kids at school, and make dinner, and go to yoga class, and invite friends over, and watch a crazy Spanish TV show with Frances, and sing to Beatrice, and think about what to get Gabriel for his birthday. But in the midst of all of it, many times a day, I go under. And everything is louder and stranger, and my memories and thoughts of Mike are more vivid and embodied and overwhelming. My sorrow crushes me. And then I cry and cry, and don't know how to stand up in this strange other-element. Sometimes it lasts for just one or two minutes.

Everything I do leads me back to him, in part because many of the things I am doing were impossible to do when he was in the hospital during those two weeks before he died, and nearly impossible during the weeks and months before that. 

Almost immediately after Mike died, people started coming. They brought flowers (against the rules for so long in our post-transplant house). They didn't wash their hands when they came inside (ditto). Many, many children were here, making noise and bouncing balls off the walls, and I didn't have to tell them to stop because Mike was resting. Everything changed. I had to remind myself over and over: it's okay. The dog can come in. The plants can come in. I can put the five pumps of hand sanitizer by the front door away. 

Our house now has the open door that it used to, before Mike got sick, and any kid who wants to can come over without having to be hushed and goaded into hand washing or turned away for having a runny nose. We can host a birthday party. We can plan a trip. We can play a rowdy game. But all of these regular life things that we have been missing for so long have been returned to us at an unfathomable, heartbreaking price, and because of this any pleasure I take in them is freighted with bonebreaking sadness.

In the first few days, I felt that I was inside of Mike's body. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I could barely breathe, and everything hurt. I felt the muscles of my face compose themselves in a Mike mask, the expression and stillness he acquired when in pain. When I had to pee, I would consider how difficult it would be to stand for many minutes beforehand, reluctant to try, just like Mike would in the hospital, looking at me and sighing - I guess I'll have to do this again, somehow. I would encourage him and be light and practical about the work of unplugging the monitors and finding the urinal and moving the pillows and helping him swing his legs over the side of the bed and trying not to flinch when he flinched from pain. I wanted to be calm and present for him in those moments. With him gone, I felt his pain and the heroic will it took to accomplish this basic and essential task.

Everything was blurred and heavy and disorienting when he died. I had been living so very attuned to his needs, especially during those two weeks in the hospital, that in the hours and days after his death part of me slid into his hurting frame. I was porous, without firm edges. 

That gradually subsided. Two or three days ago I noticed that my body was letting go of its unwillingness to participate fully in maintaining my existence. I have begun to sleep a little more, to feel hunger and to eat more regularly without my stomach hurting every time, and to breathe more fully, without the constricting forces of anxiety and pain posing a challenge. The physical disregulation was very terrible, but it’s ebbing away is also very terrible, another layer of loss. 

Oh Michael. I don’t want to lose that deep identification with your hurting and beloved body. But Mike. The kids. And me. We have to endure this sorrow, and we have to live.

Last night I brought Gabriel and Beatrice to the Spooky Nook sports complex for the big county Science Fair awards ceremony. Frances had brought her project on silk worms and was sitting with her other middle school friends who also had projects in the fair. We settled in with our dear friends. It was interminable. We sat in gray folding plastic chairs in a huge concrete bunker with many other parents and teachers and students who were paying much better attention. The sound system was abysmal and it was hard to hear anyone clearly at the microphone. There were endless awards. Beatrice was playing and being adorable. Gabriel was folding airplanes with the program and leaning on my shoulder. I felt fine. Then my eyes rested on the back of an elderly man’s head. His jawline was very defined and seemed to cut into his neck, just under the ear on the left side a little too much. His skin was wrinkled and brown, his hair white and thinning and tuft-like. He probably had a head and neck cancer, I thought. They probably cut something out of that spot, right there under his ear.

But he lived. And now he is sitting in this awful room supporting his teenaged grandchildren at the county science fair. Or maybe they are his great-grandchildren. He’s enjoying this.

And that’s all it took to send me back into the elemental grief world of heightened sensation and feeling, and I could feel my cheek sliding along Mike’s beautifully defined jaw, delicate yet strong, to plant a kiss right at the base of his neck, which is something I often did – to conclude a hug, to share some tenderness, to try to magically love the cancer out of him in that exact, beloved, familiar spot.

I couldn’t stop crying. Beatrice and Gabriel worked hard to distract me and bring me back to the world of the science bunker, the droning voice at the microphone listing winners, the increasing silliness in our row that was growing as a form of protest. So it didn’t last. Three minutes, tops. 

Once I told a friend that the experience of reading To The Lighthouse, one of my very favorite books, was like being underwater. I just remembered that. It really is. Virginia Woolf's grief was a powerful thing. I am planning on spending a lot of time this summer in clear, cold rivers and lakes with my children and our friends. I'm going to take this sorrow and submerge it--to honor it, and to let it move through me, flowing out into the world and back in again.