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.
