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.