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.