all the tender places

I wonder how many times over the past three years I hollered up the stairs or rapidly texted the words: I'm coming! Mike, I'm coming, just wait a minute, I'll be there. When he couldn't speak, he rang a bell upstairs. Or texted me. And I'd be washing dishing and talking to one of the kids, and not see his message for ten minutes, and feel awful when I finally looked and saw three terse texts in a row. Are you there, Meagan? I'd run up the stairs, hands dripping, chest tight, to see what was wrong.

When he was in the hospital, and it was time for me to pick up the kids or head back to work, I'd always tell him when I'd be back. And I always seemed to be running late, both to the thing I had to leave him for, and on the way back to him. I'd scramble into the car and quickly text him: I'm coming, I'm heading to the hospital now, I'll be there very soon.

Often I felt pulled to shreds. There was always a child who needed help or attention, and a dinner that needed making, and a job to show up for, and always, always Mike, especially over the last few months - spiking another fever, manifesting symptoms that I needed to call the on-call physician about, needing me to bring him water or set up his IV meds. I hated that I was always coming and so rarely simply there when the need arose.

When my clockwork tears started up at the end of savasana this past Friday, I succumbed and let my mind go to all the tender places it wanted to: the warm, smooth space between Mike's shoulder blades, how it felt to settle my cheek there when he was curled on his side, the smell of his skin, the sound of him sleeping. The clearness of his eyes. His square short fingers, his surprisingly hairy forearms, his perfectly shaped forehead - all the exqusite contours of his beloved body. Maybe that's why it occured to me: the cemetery. I can go to the cemetery. I had about 45 minutes before I was supposed to see a house that was for sale.

My mind and my body, silently yet powerfully, came together to say Mike. I'm coming. 

It wasn't with the old anxiety and worry, nor the bands of fear tightening around my heart. It was with relief. Mike, finally, I'm coming, called out my whole expansive, hurting, broken self.

So I drove all the way down Prince Street, past St. Mary's where Mike's funeral was, past bodegas with handwritten signs taped up in the windows and pregnant moms holding toddlers by the hand on the hot sidewalk and the Water Street Rescue Mission with a line of people outside waiting for some unknown yet necessary service and old men sitting on the corner. I drove through the cemetery gates and pulled over on the ill-kept gravely road and walked up the little hill to Mike's grave.

I cried and cried there in the blazing sunlight. I heard myself telling Mike through sobs how hard this was, how much I wished he could be here. But then as my crying quieted, I heard myself talking to Mike just the way I used to, which is a way I haven't inhabited for over three months.

I told him about the kids: Shakespeare camp, farm camp, friends visiting, the kittens. About the house selling, and the house buying. About the stupid credit card canceling itself on me, just because he died, about plans for Frances's birthday, about how there are so many decisions to make all by myself. About how all the money stuff that he used to manage is really hard, but it's okay. I talked to him without the piercing tightness that usually accompanies my attempts to address him; I talked to him from a place of settled sadness and intimacy.

Mike wanted to be buried, and he wanted to be buried near us. He wanted me to bring the kids to his grave; he wanted them to feel comfortable there. I don't think he thought very much about me visiting his grave in my own right. I guess I didn't either. Friday was the first time I'd ever gone alone. It was such a surprise, to feel myself slipping into my side of our old way together, sitting on the grass next to his plot, looking out the fields and woods, listening to the birdsong. Who else could I possibly give a report like that to? Only Mike. It wasn't the way I talk to myself. (And I do). It was the way I talk to him.

I didn't think Sunday would be that big a deal. I had somehow gotten through Mike's birthday, and our anniversary. But Father's Day just wasn't that important to Mike. It'll be fine, I thought.

I started the day going to church alone, and crying through the service. Then we went out with visiting friends and my mom for a lovely lunch, and I coulndn't help but notice the many families there out with fathers. I innocently checked Facebook and was bombarded by photos of women friends' husbands and fathers together. The two best dads in the world! And oh, with what pity and tears did I feel the absence of the two best dads in my world, who never had the chance to share a photo frame, but are now buried side by side.

A beautiful book was delivered at the house, and it contained a sheaf of notes from the nurses and chaplain at the hospital, people who had walked with us for so long and knew Mike well. They must have known it would arrive on Father's Day. And then I ran into a very old friend at the grocery store, someone I hadn't really talked to in years, and learned about a great sadness in her life standing together in the freezer aisle. Through it all I cried on and off with increasing frequency (and increasing disturbance for the children) until when our dear friends called and invited us for homemade sushi, I said yes, oh yes, and can I drop the kids with you and go to the cemetery first?

What a relief it is to be in that quiet green place, to sit on that hill and tell Mike how sad I am.

And while I don't feel the same fear and urgency on my way to the place where his body is buried - I don't need to fear the high fevers and breathlessness anymore - when I have to get up and walk back to my car, it hurts. It touches the rawness and pain of every goodbye I had to say to Mike when he was hospitalized. Every time it was the same; I hated to leave him. I'd linger on the other side of the heavy door; I'd cry all the way to the elevators. Sometimes a kind nurse would find me and give me a hug. Or I'd channel it into advocacy superpowers, and hunt his nurse down and review all his meds for the night and find out when the shift changed and make sure everyone had my cell.

So even though now my husband and I have been parted by death, to get up and leave the cemetery feels too much like those exhausted, sorrowful nights on 8 Lime in Lancaster and 7 Rhoads at Penn. It's an additional separation. Oh, how I hate to go.

Such a strange balancing act, to yearn for a past that can never be again and to look ahead to a future with my family that I am only beginning to imagine. To bring home kittens, to plan for summer trips, to think about buying a house, to return from the cemetery to a joyous house full of kids and friends making sushi and welcoming me with open arms, all while the deepest parts of me call out for Mike. Mike, Mike, how can we keep going like this, without you?

The only way it seems possible is if somehow he comes along with us. How can I know what God had in store for Mike, how God is faithful to us and honors our love? He is making all things new, all the time, and I don't think that can mean untethering us to our great loves and deepest anchors. Surely it means transforming all of it, the living and the dead, the past and the present and the future, the spiderwebs of love that bind us with sticky, unbreakable threads.

alliterative distinctions

A friend sent me something Elizabeth Gilbert recently posted on Facebook about her experience of grief. Her partner died six months ago. She explains that because grief is a force, and because she has allowed it to move through and ravage and humble her, she is destroyed, but not depressed. Depression, she says, is about resistance to feeling. Being destroyed by grief is about being willing to feel the feelings, though the feelings may threaten to break you. That's different.

Mike and I went to Belgium for an academic year shortly after we were married. We lived in a tiny two room apartment that was really two dorm rooms whose connecting flimsy wall had been knocked out at some point. It was by far our most spare and intimate living arrangement, furnished by a small unfinished wooden table and two chairs, a loveseat/futon, and a bed that we had fashioned from two wooden twin frames that were in the apartment when we arrived. Our big purchase was a double mattress to throw on top of them after we pushed them together, kindly delivered by a new Belgian friend who had a car and knew where to buy a cheap mattress in the outskirts of Leuven.

Our tiny dwelling had a hot plate with two burners, a mini fridge, and a sink. It had two bathrooms (from its days as two separate student rooms) so we used one as a pantry/beer cellar. (The beer! That's when I learned to enjoy it. We would buy a case of Chimay or Leffe at prices that astounded our American sensibilities and store it on the cool tile floor of the shower).  I loved the market and accessibility of things that had felt like splurges only justifiable on special occasions in our previous life: beautiful cheeses, the best chocolate, briny olives, slabs of smoked fish. So we cooked often at home, and sat at the wooden table situated below the apartment's one decorative flourish: an enormous leaded window broken into diamonds in shades of green, yellow, and rose, listening to the music we borrowed from the fantastic collection at the local library and talking about everything we were reading, doing, seeing.

Mike had a Fulbright to work on his dissertation. It was for married students, and I wasn't supposed to work while we received it. So I did what you might expect: sat in on a couple of classes, found myself an intership in Brussels, tutored some sweet Korean children whose parents worked at a branch of Samsung in Leuven. Mike and I borrowed beat up gearless bikes through the university program and joined the throngs of cyclists clogging all the city streets. I called mine the Pink Lady (before the apple of the same name arrived in grocery stores) and rode her to the university gym, and the train station on my way to Brussels, and to the university library I favored, where I the English literature and psychology books were housed.

I had a lot of time to myself. So did Mike. He had his own spot in the philosophy library, and took classes with a philosopher that showed him that it was still possible to truly think - not just think about the thoughts of philosophers gone by. He was also a believer, and his example was a gift then to Mike, who was struggling with a sense of pointlessness about academic work, his own uncertain faith path, and what it would mean to become a father. We knew we wanted to get pregnant when we came home. We figured the soonest we could have a baby was after I graduated from my social work program (I was taking a leave of absence that year). Frances was indeed born three weeks after I finished my degree. That year in Belgium was our pregnancy pregnancy; our preparation for the move into parenthood. It was a chapter set out of regular life that offered open expanses of time for all the quiet, conversation, solitude, reading, cooking, walking, and gentle adventuring that a person could want who was preparing to be changed forever.

Mike was also depressed. He had been depressed before, but was always unwilling to name it that. He did not want to be managed; he did not want to be labeled. He resisted, as Elizabeth Gilbert describes, not only the feelings but their reality as well. We didn't use the language of mental health to talk about his indecisiveness, his bouts of social withdrawal, his irritability, his relentlessly demanding and unsatisfied attitude towards himself. Depression is so tricky, because it is interwoven with who you are. But I knew, and he knew, that it was also suppressing who he was, dampening his bright spirit. We just didn't talk about it that way.

Until he did. That year in Belgium was a time of hope and newness, despite the heavy gray sky and similar mood that would overtake my husband. He was finally able to name his experience, and came up with a distinction of his own: he was depressed, not despairing. He was connected to faith, hope, and love - perhaps more strongly than ever - and he was having a really, really hard time staying afloat emotionally. But those two things could coexist, and for this realization he was grateful. He could become a Papa, and a good Papa, because despair could never sink its talons into him.

No, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.

Depressed, not despairing. That opened up a new space for Mike.

In time, he walked right through it. Some of his happiest and most fulfilling days were with baby Frances. He contentedly listened to audio books while pushing her around town on long walks, and avoided other parents, and shoved her into my arms when I came home from work. He woke up before the sun to write his dissertation, he planned a garden, he began work on a mural in the dining room. He saw a therapist and a psychiatrist. He developed a disciplined Centering Prayer practice. He started the Lancaster Film Society in our living room with new friends. It was a time of creative, joyful engagement with life. Sometimes I stood back and marveled. Sometimes I felt a little uneasy. What happened to this guy?

Becoming a father made Mike's light shine that much brighter. Why didn't we do this earlier? he'd say. Why don't we have five more?

(He didn't always want five more; things changed, that time passed. But I kind of did. One of the things I mourn, that cancer took away, was the possibility of a fourth child. Maybe I wouldn't have longed for another baby if my beloved husband wasn't so sick, if some doctor hadn't told us to sign right here and promise you won't have any kids while on this clinical trial, if the choice hadn't been taken away. But does it matter? I loved having babies with Mike. I can't anymore, and it hurts.)

A friend asked me recently if I ever worried about myself. If I looked around with my clinical goggles on, took stock, and thought: geez, this non-normative grief thing is really messing me up. Things are pretty bad. Time to check in to the sanatorium.

I told her that I'm devastated, but not disconnected. So no, I don't worry. Many times a day I'm laid low by feelings matched in power only by those I felt falling in love with Mike. The sorrow makes my knees buckle, my chest tighten; my whole body aches. One can only submit. The alternative seems much worse to me: an isolated, walled off cave, disconnected from myself, from Mike, from everyone.

Though I suffer, I feel part of this world. I am loved and loving. I am surrounded by a community of people whom I adore. I want to tell them about what is happening now, what happened then, all of it. Miraculously they are willing to listen.

(I usually cry when I write one of these posts. This morning, it's the awareness of so many people's faithful presence, their repeated invitations and welcome of my tears, my fountain of words, their generous acceptance of the essentially self-centeredness of this dark season in my life, that has me weeping now.)

Easter arrived a little over two weeks after Mike died. I remember saying, why can't it stay Lent? Why can't it be Lent all year? The kids felt the same. Spring? Resurrection? Lilies?? Nah. We'll just sit here in shadowy winter for as long as we can stand it, thank you very much.

And though I have complained, this rainy cold spring has been a gift to me. It protected me from the gorgeous weather and happy families in the park and a general awareness of boisterous, irrepressible life celebrating itself all around me that typically arrives earlier than it did this year. It delayed an encounter with the insistent joy of green, growing spring.

But earlier this week, the rain stopped. I brushed layers of pollen off the seat of my bike which had been neglected on our porch for months. I carried it to the sidewalk and headed off to meet an entirely new friend for lunch. Someone who didn't know Mike, or our story, but wanted to listen. Gabriel had borrowed my helmet and left it somewhere I coulnd't find so I could, in good conscience, feel the cool wind blow my hair around as I coasted down James Street.

The sun was shining, the air was gentle, I was suffused with that marvelous mix of calm and quiet excitement in my body that only an easy helmet-less bike ride on a cool and bright spring morning, heading towards an unknown and somewhat risky experience, can provide.

A little part of me drew back, noticing, a bit disturbed. Meagan, can you really feel this way? Is it allowed? What about the devastation? What about Mike?

I arrived at an intersection where there was some road work. A young slender man stood in the center ready to direct traffic (I was it, at the moment) with his orange flag. I slowed to a stop and asked, is it okay if I go this way?

He looked at me and smiled broadly. His eyes were bright. Then he said,

You can go any way you want to.

Okay, I smiled back. Thanks.

As I rode away I heard him call after me, just be careful!

So there was my answer. I can feel this way. I can go any direction I want to. Each moment presents itself, and all come with dangers. I'm okay with that. I accept. Destroyed, not depressed. Devasted, not disconnected. Never, ever despairing.

Michael, Michael. I cry for you. I cry for the beauty and light of this world that penetrates all darkness. You taught me so much about that. How could I turn away from it now?