fan letter

Dear Kevin Wilson,

I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to. I don't want to put your other books on hold at the library, or follow you on social media, or see your name pop up in the table of contents in the next New Yorker I miraculously manage to crack open because more details would make you into a more real person, which would dim the magic of the world you made in Nothing to See Here. I want the inner fabric of the story to stay real, so I think it's best if you remain in its shadowy periphery. But I also want to say thank you to someone because it was so good - so very good - and I feel a lot of hope for myself and for my kids in the wake of finishing it under a little spotlight on this airplane gliding through the dark night sky somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe Florida. I can't see a thing down there so it's hard to say. But it feels good to point one's gratitude in a particular direction. (Which is, incidentally, a big part of why I believe in God.)

I started your book a couple of days into a trip to Jamaica with my three children, after I had finished Nora McInerny's second memoir, No Happy Endings. Somehow that seems pertinent because the two stories have been talking to each other in my mind. My husband died twenty-one months ago after nearly three years of experimental treatments for his rare lymphoma. Five days before we departed for Jamaica, the first man I've dated since Mike died broke up with me after three very disorienting and exciting weeks. My children were not at all pleased with this brief romance; not that I wanted them to know about it, but predictably the cat yowled and scratched its way out of that bag almost immediately. So it was a thing. And its ending was strange and sad for me but eventually - like two days later - I came to see that it was right and felt peaceful about it. He wasn't well enough, and I've done enough caregiving for the time being. But now I know that kind of thing can happen.

Needless to say, there were many moments while swimming and sunning and ordering three Shirley Temples and one mojito at the swim up bar at the Beaches resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, surrounded by healthy happy not even sunburned mom-dad-and-two kids families when I felt like a total weirdo. I felt marked by all we have been through, like there must be a big flashing sign over my head blinking the word GRIEVING or LONELY or BUSTED or maybe just NOT NORMAL* with a big arrow pointing at my heart. I couldn't help but notice that I seemed to be the only single parent in the whole strange alternate world of the resort. I was definitely the only person who cried the whole boat trip back from snorkeling, thinking of the calm Papa presence my terrified Beatrice didn't have with her in the water, and the wonderful guide who offered her his own impersonal version of that, which totally worked.

But I also had so many moments of gratitude, and awareness of the closeness and understanding I have with my kids. They are weirdos with me. They know. They didn't glom onto the packs of privileged children that roamed the resort, ice cream cones in hand, dripping chlorine in line at the water slide, yelling to one another. That would have been fine, and they could have done that, because they have decent social skills, plus they're pretty privileged too and took to the endless supplies of sweets and thrills just as effortlessly as any well-tended American child would. But I think we preferred each others' company. Only we knew what their Papa would say about the late night karaoke that kept us awake at night, or the curly fries we ate every day, or the way Beatrice, eyes shining, loved snorkeling in the end. Only we knew that we were there because he died - no way would Mike have set foot in that place. Also we're smart and funny and good company. And excellent huggers. And we are, actually, ready to embrace everything, to eat it all, drink it in, tolerate fear and cheesiness in equal measure despite our (to varying degrees) cautious temperaments, because of all we have lost.

So anyway. Your quiet/not quiet excellent book gave me hope for weirdo children, and weirdo adults too. For the possibility that lonely weirdo adults can take good care of lonely weirdo children, and not let them down ever - at least not in any big terrible ways. Right now my heart is so broken and so big, so vast, in this strange and unplanned and porous moment in my life. Your novel offered an unexpected version of that state of being. I recognized myself in it. Who wouldn't, really? I love that.

Thank you.

yours truly,
Meagan



*I do realize that these are feelings most all humans experience, even gorgeous moms with living husbands sipping frozen drinks on the beach in Jamaica. Nothing to see here, I know. It was just hard to remember that sometimes during our trip.

growing

A few months after Mike died I stumbled upon a community of fellow widows in the most unlikely of places. Social media! At the time the Hot Young Widows Club was a private Facebook group (they've since changed platforms) with an Instagram presence (still going strong); my wading into that particular online support community seemed to open up into deeper waters, all varieties of people and groups having to do with grief, trauma, recovery, healing. Being a hot young widow is damn isolating, and here were countless people who knew all about it.

In the beginning I couldn't stop reading their stories. I could've spent a week in bed, curled up with my phone, content to slide into so much sadness with nothing to slow my descent. But of course my life doesn't facilitate that kind of thing, and over time I've become more moderate with my online widow world consumption. I even share occasionally, and man am I grateful, because when I do my fellow wids share their hard-won wisdom and dark humor generously and it is always helpful.

The solidarity and sadness and inspiration and wisdom is a big part of why Facebook and Instagram have me hooked. That, and the weird scab-picking thing I do while scrolling through other peoples' intact happy families and active social lives. It's kind of weird, really. Wids affirming this life is fucking hard alongside non-wids sharing photos of their fucking joyful anniversary dates which makes a part of me shrivel and spit and curl up in a ball inside. A part that apparently likes to do that, because I haven't stopped scrolling.

And sometimes, sometimes, a meme wanders onto my Instagram of a gorgeous, thin-in-a-tasteful-way twenty-something woman staring meaningfully off into a sunset that features inspiring words about how grief teaches us to truly love ourselves - or something like that - and touches both ends of the social media universe for me: something that is intended to offer validation to the griever (c'est moi) but also makes the griever feel like a total freak. I am so not staring at the sunset. I am crying in the minivan.

Recently I read the story of a young woman who lost her husband and the more I read, the more irritated I felt. She exuded self-assurance. Her feelings about her partner and their relationship seemed uncomplicated. She took a very long time off work after he died, traveling and exploring herself through creative expression of various sorts. She advocated taking as much time as one needs to heal following a loss and she had a beautiful narrative to share about what had happened to both of them. It all seemed so ... tidy.

And irritating. Very. The shriveled smallness within me reads that version of loss and says: oh, how nice for you. Retreats, faraway beaches, endless travel, the occasional profound encounter with a medium on another continent. Those are great ideas, sure. I would love to "heal" too but what about my children, house, job, cats, HVAC filters, dying houseplants, weird middle-aged health issues? There are so many obligations, so many anchors fixing me to this spot. How do I invite grief to move through me when my own movement can feel so very confined?

But then I had this uncomfortable, familiar suspicion: I maybe hide behind my responsibilities. Not that I don't have a legit bunch of them...but I maybe kinda sorta have always done that. This enneagram type 2 is afraid of even articulating a desire to heal, even as I look around and see the signs of healing in my life miraculously happening despite my ambivalence and without my explicit consent: I can sleep at night, I feel less vigilance and worry, I fixate less on the traumas we shared, I have space and energy to think about what I want in my life now without feeling guilt or anxiety about leaving Mike behind. At least not as much.

Making grief about me and my needs - as many have modeled for me online - feels dangerously close to betraying those I love most. Isn't this about them? When Mike was sick I helped him and the children carry their feelings. They were so big, and so hard. I tried to clear a space in myself to be what they needed then. I was all responsiveness, reassurance. Also exhaustion. Now I spend my days at work helping my clients hold their feelings, then come home and do my best (which is not always pretty, but I'm trying) to be present to my kids in the whirlwind of their activities and ever-changing emotional needs and the race to get homework and dishes and showers in before it gets so late that I feel like a bad mom.

Letting Mike and the kids be at the center of things is a way to let myself off the hook. Avoidance. It's a temptation I think many of us understand. I have always struggled to articulate and take responsibility for my own needs. Going through such terrors with Mike gave me insight and courage I didn't know I had in that department, but it's still super scary. If I say what I want, will I still be a good mom? A good widow? Will I still be worthy of love if I give to myself sometimes rather than slip into the more comfortable and long-established habit of giving to them?

I often instinctively feel my grief should be about Mike. He's the one that suffered, he's the one who is missing every amazing thing that happens on a regular old Monday night around here. But it is also true that he and I traveled that fiery, solitary path together. And yet I am still here, holding these ashes that smudge and darken my hands and eyes. It seems a waste to watch them slowly flutter away on stray gusts of wind; in braver days, I would rather bury them, nourishing my own soil, and wait for something new and surprising to shoulder its green way up out of the ground.

Maybe growing is a better light to move towards than healing, with its whiff of resolution and meme-ready tidiness. This hurts forever. I wouldn't have it any other way. But a girl can do a hell of a lot with open wounds; maybe more than she could before she sustained them. She can risk telling you about her longing to find spaces to exist apart from her identities of mother, therapist, widow, daughter, sister, friend. Her yearning to stretch and move everything: body and soul, spirituality, creativity, sexuality, language, intellect. Her desire to feel her own power, to go somewhere new. To be quiet, to be loud. To be a stranger. To be strange.

Thank you, irritating social media widow. I feel brave today because of you.

the season of loose ends

I know the season is changing because my feet are freezing. It's fall now, yes, but for me it's also wool sock season - an extended state that usually starts in October and ends in early May. It was perfect this afternoon. I forgot my jacket in my office because I didn't need it walking out into the golden sunshine after work, and I changed directly into sandals when I got home. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'd forgotten that as the sky darkens, my toes start to turn to icy appendages prone to going numb with the chill, even if the chill in question is a balmy sixty four degrees.

Getting into cold sheets with cold feet at night is the worst. (Sleeping in this weather is, incidentally, the best). For twenty years I coped by stealthily sliding my flipper-like feet in between Mike's legs. Sometimes he would scream. Or more often, after a gasp: your feet are made of ice, Meagan. There were jokes about the blood not being able to make it down the interminable length of my feet. Who knows the reason they are so freakishly cold, but luckily Mike was always warm and didn't really mind (he sometimes grabbed an icy appendage on purpose, to cool down). It was a little ritual we played out every night. Occasionally I'd wear my wool socks to bed and he'd protest. What! That's crazy, he'd say. Take those awful things off. C'mon, just go ahead and put your feet right here...Honestly, his hot skinny calves provided rather skimpy skin contact, but it was enough to take the edge off and I'd fall right asleep.

Last night, after eating my way through a couple of stressful parenting situations and finally getting everyone into bed, I read the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday paper (yes, you're right, last night was Wednesday) which was a fine thing to do to feel like a normal person again (highly recommend reading about Pedro Almodovar and Antonio Banderas while remembering scenes from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown if you need to recover your emotional equilibrium) but I did it sans slippers and by the time I came upstairs and brushed my teeth and slid my bare legs and feet into the marvelous clean cool sheets the freezing feet situation was irreversible.

Mike and I bought this enormous mattress just before Christmas in 2005. Frances was sixth months old. It might have been our first real date after she was born; my mother had come over so that we could go to the holiday party for the clinic where I was working. We were dressed up. Frances had just fallen asleep. I felt ambivalent about leaving her, not to mention nervous about socializing with a bunch of big personalities I had only recently started working alongside. As we tiptoed away from our sleeping baby's room, Mike hesitated in the darkened hallway, looked at me and said: should we go to the mall and buy a new mattress instead?

We'd been sleeping on one I bought from the friend of a friend in Brooklyn for twenty-five dollars. It had traveled with us to four different apartments and now at least one of us wasn't a grad student anymore. We had often talked about how nice it would be to have a real bed. A new bed. So that's how we spent that night, all dolled up, lying down on every mattress in the department store at the mall together, our nice shoes hanging off the ends, debating their firmness and comfort.

The bed we chose is the same bed I got into last night. My feet no longer hunt for Mike's slender legs, nosing towards his side of the bed on chilly nights. I got into bed last night and I thought damn. Summer's over; here we go. How do I cope with my icy feet in this new house, this new life? I don't know how I deal with this. What are my techniques going to be?

Then I stopped, surprised. Wait. Just a few days ago I had realized we have lived in this house for an entire year. We closed at the end of September in 2018. That I meant I already had slept in this bed, in this room, on many chilly nights. But in that moment I honestly couldn't remember any of them. Had I really gotten into this empty bed, in a room Mike had never shared with me, in just this way, alone, hundreds of times? It didn't seem possible.

Time is so weird. Have I said that before? Time is so weird.

This morning over oatmeal I asked Bea if she could remember what last fall was like in this house. She immediately began describing snacks and games and face paint and I quickly realized she thought I had asked her if she remembered the last fall fest - at her school - (she does) - so I waited until she was done and then asked her about the fall season. Like, what did we do?

Regular stuff. I was in the primary class then. 

Halloween? Did we do Halloween?

Yeah, Mama. 

And Christmas? Where did we put the tree? 

In the corner, in the living room. 

And did we buy it with anyone?

Robert.

No, no, I actually do remember that Beatrice - that was when Papa was sick having his transplant in the hospital in Philadelphia. Robert helped us get the tree. But what about last year?

Oh, yeah. That was just you and me and Didi and Gabriel.

I felt really, really weird. I couldn't remember getting the tree at all. I sat there silently looking at the floorboards in the hall, newly exposed since we ripped up the carpeting, then watching a cat try to trap a fly on the windowsill in vain, then looking at nothing at all, until Beatrice teased me for staring into space and acting weird. 

I sure as heck felt weird. I still do. It's as if I've lost an entire year. I can honestly barely remember what it felt like to be in my bedroom at this time last year. All the important holidays are remote in my mind. I think back to clients I worked with and I'm not sure what we did together.

Once, shortly after Mike died, someone who had gone through a similar loss told me that sure, the first year is really hard, but the second year is so much worse. You think you've finally made it through all those milestones, and that things should get better from here on out...but then they don't. It just feels more real.

Did I need to hear that five weeks into widowhood? Not so much.

It was crushing because I couldn't imagine an anvil in all the world heavy enough to be heavier than the one already sitting on my chest. I could barely breathe as it was. So I brushed that comment aside. Except I didn't, because I think of it often now, one year and seven months into this strange season of grief that goes on and on and never stops. Freezing toes forever. I can breathe easier now, it's true. I can enjoy things more, I'm more functional, more settled into solo parenthood. But the pain of life without my partner is relentless, and the wrongness of each and every first without him (like Frances going to her high school's homecoming dance last weekend) only becomes more irrefutable. It grows in magnitude, weight, darkness. The wrongness is like a force that pushes against me, reminding me of how we are marked for always, of what we have lost and keep on losing with each new glorious step the children take. 

With my clients I sometimes talk about uncovering and wondering about core beliefs. What are the deep beliefs they hold about who they are, how the world works, and what things are supposed to be like that inform their thoughts and feelings, that can run up against their present realities and create conflict and tensions inside? Core beliefs can be messages from childhood, from culture, from family; assumptions that lodge beneath rational, explicit thought and filter our experiences. 

Losing a life partner necessarily puts one's core beliefs into question. The ground on which my judgments and decisions and ideas stood has shifted and crumbled. A widow is untethered from the steady posts of her married identity. She is at loose ends. And she has to be. The only way to avoid the crisis is to refuse the present, and the future, which is pretty hard to do. 

I don't think you can overstate the profundity of the inner change, the inner loosening, that loss sets in motion.

So this strange season in our house that we are eleven days into our second year of living in has been one of shifting beliefs. I've reached back to childhood to test out my old core beliefs, like the things I re-embraced in North Carolina over the summer: history is important, place matters deeply, a tree can tell a sacred story. I am at home in a rhododendron forest near a cold, cold waterfall. (More simply: nature can provide a home for me.) Or the things I have learned through the harrowing experience of loss: I can say no, I can ask for help, I can be loved even if I say no and even if I need help. I can tell the truth. I can pierce my nose if I want to; I can take out a piercing if I want to. Or the old beliefs I have had to question with clearer eyes since I lost Mike: that I have always felt different, and that that has always been a source of pride and a source of shame. I have always been afraid to ask for everything I need. I have always been afraid to need, to falter, to make mistakes. And then there are the beliefs that belonged to Mike, but became part of my internal landscape, part of my inner calculations around decisions and priorities, that I have had to reluctantly give back to him, recognizing that they aren't mine to hold onto. 

What remains, besides these consistently cold feet and my discomfort with their surprising size? Is there anything about me that remains securely tethered? 

I think this unavoidable quality of being at loose ends is related to my faltering memory. This shifting about, as if my soul was a collection of marbles being carried in a box and rolling every which way with each slight turn and tip, it makes for a certain haziness.

Year One: We survived.

Year Two: What the fuck happened?

I won't even venture to speculate about Year Three, but with all that rolling around in there, I do believe anything could happen. Anything at all. 

mundane glories

Yesterday I got in the car just in time to hear Nina Totenberg's remembrance of Cokie Roberts, one she delivered with a grace and realness that made me marvel. Her friend had just died, hours ago. She had said goodbye in the hospital the night before. She had told Cokie that she would see her on the other side, where she knew that she would still be a star.

She said it like she meant it. Like she expected to be reunited with her friend. I cried. I want to go to the big broadcasting studio in the sky with them, and with everyone I love.

These early fall days have been hard for me. Hard in regular ways, "normal people" ways, or at least semi-normal people ways. I get home from work, there is usually about half an hour at home to check in with our new lovely sitter, listen to all the kids at once, greet the neighbor friends who are with them, jumping on the trampoline or playing Magic upstairs, and realize I don't know what to do about dinner. Then it's shuttling Gabriel to soccer or martial arts, Beatrice to swimming, Frances to play rehearsals. Reminders to practice guitar and scoop the kitty litter and sitting with Beatrice while she does her first grade homework. Feeding everyone somehow in the in between times (last night as I was saying goodnight to Gabriel he mentioned that he was starving. Wait - did you eat dinner tonight? Uh...no. Oh, well, I said. Too late now.) Braiding hair, hunting for clean laundry, loading the dishwasher, feeding the cats.

Remembering to breathe, forgetting to breathe, missing Mike. Missing my partner to share it with, to help me with decisions, to get mad at for not thinking to wipe down the kitchen counters after dinner or to thank for taking on a bedtime routine so I could stretch out on the couch with the New Yorker for a few minutes.

Despite the breakneck pace, each day this week I've mentioned to someone that today is the Most Perfect Day of the Entire Year. It's been gorgeous. Then the next day I wake up and it's the Most Perfect Day again. That's just mid September, when even a humble Pennsylvania town glows like a jewel around 6:30 in the evening. I was seeing everything lit by the golden setting sun tonight, noticing the brilliant edges around every leaf and brick and stop sign. I felt sad.

It was nice. Don't get me wrong, it was nice. But it wasn't striking me in the way it did when Mike was sick. I missed the heartwrenching beauty of those cancer falls we had together. Four years ago I walked these same streets; we had just arrived from our old heathy oblivious life in a state of fear and confusion. We were only three or four weeks into the first round of chemo and I remember how yellow the light looked, how unbelievably cute and clever the squirrels seemed, the way the electrical wires slashed through the bright blue sky overhead. Everything was beautiful, so beautiful it hurt.

We had two more falls together like that. We lived with so much uncertainty and pain then, and the ensuing rawness I felt often left me aching before the mundane glories of the small town we live in: its flowers, signs, hawks, children, rowhomes, dogs. The scudding clouds overhead. The red maples and yellow gingkos autumn reliably, miraculously brings.

Anyway. I don't feel the ache this year. I think it's pretty, sure. Nice. Nice day, today. Most Perfect Day of the Year! But heartbreakingly, bonecrushingly, unbearably beautiful? Not so much. Also we're late for swimming, can you guys please get in the car already.

And that makes me sad. I miss the world as I saw it when Mike was alive. I miss the quiet awareness of his grief before so much goodness, his grappling with the reality that he might have to say goodbye to the mundane glories of the world too soon. I miss the subterranean anguish I felt, beneath all my other feelings, for him and with him, a terrible underground river that I didn't always want to acknowledge. Simple pleasures brought tears to his eyes. We were cracked open, each in our own way but also in relationship, feeling our own pain and each others' pain. It could make a regular old Wednesday in September absolutely exquisite.

Add exquisite September to the pile of secondary losses. When your person dies, you lose the whole world you shared with him. It doesn't feel the same anymore because it isn't the same anymore. A September without Mike getting excited about school supply shopping has to lose some of its sparkle. It's just the way it is, which is sad. You lose the future you'd imagined, yes, but you also lose the present you'd come to depend upon and enjoy.

So many secondary losses! Also tertiary, quarternary, hundredthary, gazillionthary losses. They just keep rippling outwards, touching every new season and special day and grocery shopping trip and vacation.

I miss the world we shared together. I miss the person I was with Mike.

I still like being me, but it's a hell of a lot harder. Moving through the world while grieving your most important person is like bushwhacking a path through a new, wild landscape, even if the streets and stoplights and trees still stand. The names of the places haven't changed; no place will ever be the same again.

last bounce

Gabriel lingered in the doorway that leads to the backyard, where our two-week-old trampoline lives. It was getting dark out. The dinner dishes were nearly all put away and I was reviewing what would happen in the morning over a pile of clean laundry: wake up times for everyone, where the new school supplies were, when we needed to leave the house.

C'mon Mama, he said. Come jump on the trampoline. It's the last night of summer.

As soon as I finish putting away the laundry, I said.

Mama, just come. You're the best one. Come jump with me.

You guys go ahead, I said. I'll be there in a minute.

Beatrice joined him. I could hear them whooping and laughing. I put away a stack of dishtowels in the drawer next to the oven and then put the kids' clothes on the bottom stair and then let my forehead rest on the cool white wall in the hallway opposite framed pictures of Mike and the family we used to be and cried. For a moment.

The first day of school without you. Again. And this year Frances is going to high school.

And they are all so beautiful, and bright, and infuriating, and tall. And you are missing it.

I took an inbreath, I exhaled loud and long. I went out into the near-darkness. Gabriel and Beatrice were thrilled to see me. I crawled in through the little zippered flap in the netting and began jumping with them. With all the heightened emotions that the last day of summer had brought I recklessly decided to join them without stopping in the bathroom first, and as any of you who have borne and birthed multiple babies can predict, by the third glorious jump had peed right through my shorts. I didn't even care. I did mention it to Gabriel and Beatrice, who suggested I just keep on peeing.

Over the side, Mama. How about in the flowers? said Beatrice. Anywhere in the yard! Just don't go back inside!

Frances came out and climbed onto the trampoline with us. I decided to indeed simply ignore the peeing for a few more crazy bounces; it seemed a fair price to pay in order to delay breaking the joyful vespertine spell we all sparkled under.

Last week I met with my spiritual director and told her about my summer experiences and the moments of unexpected peace and stillness they had offered me, and in tandem with these, two recent dreams that I experienced more as visitations than as typical worry-laden loopy narratives.

Mike came to see me. That's what I thought after I woke from the first: Mike came to see me. I felt so content. It was right before I left to visit a friend at a very remote college community in California all by myself. I was so worried in those days about leaving the kids and the house and the cats and my mother and friends and the babysitters and camp directors who would care for them in my absence. In the dream Mike came and sat on the edge of my bed.

It was so simple, so peaceful. We said very little. We didn't take our eyes off each other. I told him how happy I was that he came.

Yes, he said, smiling.

After the trip I dreamed I came home to find him watering the garden. I went up behind him and hugged him. He held the hose in his left hand and smiled at me. I wasn't sure he knew he had died but I wasn't about to bring it up; it was just too nice to greet him as we might have normally in the evening after school and work. He took a moment to inspect my skin, asking if my perioral dermitis had been acting up, and was I feeling okay?

Oh yes, it's been fine.

Mike's care for me was something I hadn't thought about in a long time. The feeling of his concern, his care. And the love he had for plants. The peacefulness he brought to gardening and tending outside spaces. His quiet, tender, understated kindnesses.

I loved our trips this summer. I loved being in my old North Carolina home, and in the stark, stirring California desert. I didn't worry about betraying Mike, or leaving him behind, or doing things in a way he wouldn't like. I am growing in trust, perhaps, but more than that the dreams gave me the permission I needed to encounter those places just as I am, in this moment, in the midst of this harrowing loss that is still happening - a loss that isn't an event with a beginning middle and end but rather a part of me that never stops - a loss that has space for gasping stolen tears in the hallway and unhinged wild bouncing with my three bereaved beloved children in a pair of wet shorts on a Sunday night in August when we should be getting ready for bed.

When I finished telling my spiritual director about the summer's riches, and my newfound ability to engage in them with so much less anxiety and sorrow and guilt, she smiled a beautiful smile. She said it was a joy to see me coming out. Or rather, returning to myself. Emerging, circling back, strengthening in who I am. And how extraordinary it was, how incredible, that God loved me so very much and had offered these people and places to help me in the process of circling back - and in and out - all at the same time.

Yes, that sounded right. I felt light hearted, grateful. I left her with a tender sensitivty to the aching world around me. I got into my minivan which seemed to nose forward of its own accord and looked around at the tree-lined streets I know so well, the corner stores, the stone churches, the wires overhead, the bright blue sky. At a red light I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the wheel, and happened to look over my right shoulder and out the open window where I saw a little girl standing on her pink scooter on the cracked sidewalk a few feet away. Her sweaty bangs were sticking to her temples. Our eyes met for a moment, and then, then, then her face opened into the most exquisite grin. She was missing teeth. Her eyes shone. She waved at me. The light turned green and I smiled and waved back with a heart full to bursting as I continued my sail down E. Orange Street.

And then the fullness was too much, and I sobbed.

I love the world. It is so beautiful it hurts. I am alive, and Mike is missing it.

on the hook

In ballet class a couple of weeks ago, our teacher Nadine was giving some instruction before we began a sequence of tendus at the bar. She emphasized, per usual, that we should draw up in the front and down in the back, that we should imagine a hook right through the top of the skull pulling us upwards. All you have to do is hang on it. She paused and smiled knowingly at us.

Easy, right?

We all smiled back. Oh yeah, sure. Easy. Then she turned her elegant back on us to begin the music.

I like the hook imagery - faintly gruesome as it may be - even better than the invisible cord I was taught to imagine pulling me up nice and tall as a child. I like the heft and gleam of a hook, it's there-ness. I can almost feel it.

In everyday life I twist and contort and otherwise rebel via a thousand embodied objections to the simplicity and space my hook offers. I move as if it isn't there, gently tugging me upwards. I lean into one hip, tired of standing. I tense the muscles of my neck, my shoulders creep up into my ears, I bend my upper spine into the curl of a shepherd's crook to better see my phone. But then, if the stars align, for one hour on Monday mornings I try my best to cooperate with its gracious intentions, which is honestly nearly impossible. Nadine walks by and pushes one shoulder down, draws one hip forward, gently correcting all the crazy asymmetries and tensions my forty-two year old body has acquired. I've come by them all honestly. But still.

I've been meeting with a spiritual director occasionally over the past months and during one of our conversations, I was talking about my children's discomfort with church and God - the very idea of God - since Mike's death. Their religious education was paramount to Mike, and he worried about what would happen after he died. I took offense at this, thinking he didn't trust me to take them to Sunday School and church and continue the traditions we had developed together as a family. We had a fight about it not that long before he died; I felt so hurt that he didn't trust me to parent them in the ways we always had, not to mention that it sounded to me that he suspected I wasn't invested in my own faith. Like I was just going along with things, it didn't really matter that much, and once he was out of the picture I'd ignore the children and take my Sunday mornings back for the secular pleasures of the New York Times and yoga class and brunch.

That's what I heard and felt then, anyway. Now it occurs to me that Mike might have foreseen their hurt and anger and understood that their - and my - relationship to God and faith would necessarily change if he died. Get a lot more complicated, at the very least. I hadn't considered that. I hadn't considered anything about Mike dying while he was still alive, not even in his final hours, because I couldn't bear to.

But damn, Mike could be prescient. Not to mention annoyingly unflinching in the face of difficult realities. And getting anyone to come to church with me these days is downright painful. I don't think forcing will help the situation, so I'm sitting and waiting and feeling very uncomfortable with the unsettled, avoidant relationship my children have with church. I'm imagining Mike's disappointment, and feeling that awful weight, and waiting for the path forward to reveal itself.

I'm also reading the paper and going to yoga and taking the kids to brunch. Which I enjoy.

Anyway, I was bringing this to my spiritual director and she asked me about my own conflicted feelings about God, independent of the kids and Mike. Well, yes. I am very twisted up with this one. I would like Mike's vision and faith. I want security and comfort in my own relationship with God, but some of the time I'm not even confident She exists. Or if She does, what exactly Her relationship to creation is. Or how she might respond to the way I swear over obituaries for people - especially men - who live to be 94 years old. That fucker. Good for him. Hope he enjoyed his legions of great-goddamn-grandchildren. What does God make of that? 

I am sure that I have never stopped yearning for God - wondering and wishing and wanting - but when Gabriel asks me how I can worship a God who "just keeps on smiting you like this" I really don't have a good answer.

My spiritual director pointed out that even if I'm not sure God exists, even if I'm mad at God, even if I feel completely lost, God loves me just as much. You don't have to be or do or think or feel anything in particular, she explained. God isn't withdrawing from you because you have doubts, or because you haven't been able to persuade your kids to go to Sunday School since Mike died, or because you don't pray in a particular way. God loves you fully, completely, without condition.

Oh.

Now sometimes I say a prayer that goes something like thanks for loving me even if I'm not so sure about You.

And I really mean it. I say it with a peaceful, grateful heart. I love it when I realize that something isn't up to me. God's love isn't in my control. Whether I'm aware of it or not, whether I like it or not, God has Her divine outrageous shiny heavenly hooks in me, and they won't suddenly dislodge if I'm pissed off or avoiding church or letting Mike and the kids down on the religious front.

What does that even mean? Not sure. But I like to imagine that underlying connection as I do my ballet hook: there are gestures one can make, an awareness one can cultivate, that might enable a certain ease and strength in hanging on the hook that is always already there anyway. One can participate in hookedness, cooperate, consent, even show gratitude for the endless tugging, and thus create space and possibility and maybe even a lightening of our pain.

Maybe it's all the same hook anyway. When I feel myself tall and broad and wide, when I stand in tadasana fully, I am aware of it as a gesture that embodies receptivity and gratitude. Maybe simply standing up straight it is a way of acknowledging and making space for God's tugging, tireless love. (Funny that standing up straight is so ridiculously hard to do.)

I went to church - by myself - yesterday morning, and one of the readings was about Martha and Mary. Oh man, do I feel uncomfortable when Jesus says Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. Your sister Mary has the right idea. I become Martha and I want to throw up my hands and say fine Jesus, fine, but who is going to make dinner if we are all sitting at your feet? You're right, I am worried and distracted, but if I'm not, who will get all this shit done? Do you have any children? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get everyone to swimming and soccer and internships and guitar and piano lessons and to pack their lunches and get them to dentist appointments and worry about their social and emotional development and schooling and help them fall asleep when they are scared and make them do a chore now and then and convince them to get over their terror in the water and just learn to swim already?

And have you ever tried doing this kind of thing when your husband is dead, and there's no one to turn to and say this is so hard, what should we do, and you're really sad and lonely, and the buck always and forevermore stops with you and only you?

The priest did a nice job of interpreting the passage in a more inclusive light, citing various writers who believe Jesus is not dismissing Martha's actions but rather showing us that her activity and Mary's receptivity are complementary aspects of a faithful life. Sounds nice, but I can't get around Jesus's words. Mary has the better part. Mary totally wins. Martha feels hurt and put upon and to make it worse she's missing out on the better part.

Oh, Martha. I see you. It's so hard.

But then I thought about the hook. I looked up at the ring of childlike angels painted on the round, high ceiling above the altar - they are rimmed in gold and all alike and appear to be looking kindly down on us humans below, their hands tented in prayer. I imagined them all holding fishing lines between their palms. Fishing lines connected to hooks.

There's that whole I-will-make-you-fishers-of-men bit, and the loaves and fishes etc, but maybe before and beneath any of that we are just a bunch of big fat fish, always already hooked ourselves. Always already loved completely, always already part of something much bigger than whether we are anxious do-ers or dreamy be-ers. Martha and Mary are equally cherished, equally connected. Maybe the most important part of the story is that Jesus is there with them both. When I had that thought, I didn't feel quite so defensive and protective of Martha/myself. I felt a glimmer of my own state of hookedness. Everyone sitting around me, too. Their always-already-no-matter-what-lovedness. And I thought of Mike, and how it didn't make much sense to think death would change a single thing about his - or anyone else's - being beautifully, unconditionally, always and forevermore on the hook.

green time

I would like to see time. 

Beatrice was in the back seat. I glanced at her in the mirror.

Not like seeing the future, I don't mean that. I mean what time is, what it looks like. Maybe it's a kind of ... greenish air.

Oh, yes, I said. I'd like to see that too. Maybe it's like ... water. Something you can't really hold, something that moves.

Maybe.

I sat at a familiar light, resting my hands on top of the steering wheel and enjoying a pleasantly fizzing excitement about where this imaginative, philosophical discussion with my six year old might lead. We were both quiet. My mind started reaching towards the mysteries of time and space, past and present, life and death.

Bea's voice suddenly ruptured the pregnant silence of the minivan. She had a new idea.

Mama, could you play It's Raining Tacos on your phone? Pleeeeeease? Or, wait, I know! Cat Flushing a Toilet!

The moment had already passed, as all do. Then I had to disappoint my girl because if I hear one of those autotuned monstrosities one more time I will have to run away to Australia, where children surely have better taste.

At the end of June, I drove us to North Carolina for a week. We met up with friends in the mountain town that is situated near my beloved UU camp that I went to in the summers growing up. My family spent time there too, as my dad would serve as minister for week-long family camps in between the youth camp sessions my sister and I would attend. I went most summers between age 9 - 17. My Mountain camp friends were precious to me, and many of us exchanged letters during the 50 weeks of the year that we weren't in camp together. I was a counselor the summer after my dad died, in 1996. I visited once more with college friends in the fall of 1997.

And that was it - until a few weeks ago.

We rented a house in the mountains with our friends. The last stretch of the drive seemed interminable. Everything in the car felt sticky. Bits of popcorn and crushed Pringles coated the floor mats. The children had driven each other and me insane after two days of being car-bound. When we finally arrived, I pulled into the gravel parking area, opened the door, and paused, feeling the green mountain air gently and insistently push all the accumulated stress of the drive, the irritation with my children, the uncertainty about where we were, and the worry over whether all of this was a good idea right off my shoulders, my back, my hips. The air passed in and over me and took most of that stuff along with it. I breathed deeply. It smelled exactly right. Like home.

The next day we met up with a dear old family friend at the Mountain. Lee is a folk musician and storyteller who has been river guiding on the Nantahala for forty years. My dad and Lee were particularly close. When I got out of the car at the Mountain and everything looked and felt just as it should, just as it always has, I felt my heart stretching, pushing at my sternum. I stepped with Lee, my children, and our friends out onto a place called Meditation Rock, where one is surrounded by the blue and gray and green mountains, the abundant sky, the spirits of those who came before us, and began to cry. It was so beautiful. I missed my dad.

Lee cried with me. He understood. Kit Howell! What a joy it was to be on Meditation Rock with you.

Our summer travels since Mike died (Vermont, Colorado, New England and New York last summer; North Carolina and New England this summer) are fraught for us. A year ago, I wanted to give my children all the things they couldn't have in the years Mike was sick. Adventure, freedom, travel, new formative experiences in beautiful places. It was hard though; we were still reeling, in pieces, grieving Mike and grieving the family we used to be, uncertain who or what we now were. I thought farflung adventures would help us figure that out, or at least help us to know that we still were a family, albeit deeply broken and diminished.

Did it? I'm not sure. I cried my way through most of those trips. I felt Mike's absence acutely in the places we went that he had loved. Vermont was heart breaking. Our Colorado river trip cracked open my grief in a terrible, scouring way; that canyon was big enough to hold the fathomless sadness coursing through me - and so much more - so it just kept pouring out. I barely slept; the space and the sorrow wouldn't let me. I was grateful to be there, but it wasn't easy (for me, or I suspect, anyone else close to me on that trip).

My last time at the Mountain was in 1997. I fell in love with Mike in 1998. He had never been there; we never visited. I had to acknowledge that I had stayed away from an incredibly special place for many years because Mike wasn't interested in going, and I wasn't interested in pushing the issue. It never even came up; I just knew he didn't want to go - for a number of complicated reasons - so I didn't ask. Last summer that realization would have made me sad, worried about the ways we let each other down in our marriage, but I'm okay with it now. We were imperfect people, doing our best to love each other in our imperfect marriage; certain priorities came to the fore in our shared life while others fell to the side. That's what happens. You build something together; you make choices.

The truth is I was grateful that we'd never been to the Mountain together. I didn't have to feel Mike's absence there in the way I had to in Vermont last summer; this was my place, my family's place, and I was full of relief to return to it, feel it's abiding hold on me. It's something I can bring along into this uncertain, unfolding future with my children. Being there knit the pre-Mike parts of me closer to the post-Mike parts of me. That whole week, seeing old friends and visiting special places, plunging into the shock of cold water at the base of a waterfall, navigating gentle rapids with my children, seeking daily ice cream cones, and sharing it all with friends who were seeing it for the first time tethered me to myself. Time felt like something palpable.

Our marriage was a tree. We sent our roots down into soil that our parents and grandparents and countless others that I will never know prepared for us, soil that our childhoods enriched, that our friendships made fertile. But the tree was us. Mike was my person, and I was his, and maybe this metaphor would work better with some entwined trunks imagery but I'm just going for it: one tree. One life we shared. We grew our careers and homes and children from that place of strength and connection. One's twenties and thirties are so full; in the scant time we each had for ourselves I might go to a yoga class or take a run or see a friend for a drink. Mike would pray or meditate, read a novel, take a walk. But those were the stolen hours, essential yet peripheral. Everything else was directed towards feeding the tree: meals together, plans for the kids, decisions about what to do with the garden and where to take a vacation.

Our tree was very beautiful. Its roots were complex and knotty and overlapping; it's branches were heavy with vibrant green in some seasons, bare and stark in others. The reality of the tree, it's weighty, undeniable aliveness, was never in question. For better and worse it was ours, it was us, it was ever-changing and yet ever-steady. The center we moved from. Even when Mike was sick in bed for days on end, unable to speak, the tree was undiminished.

When Mike died I felt as though our tree had been hit by lightning. The tree where I lived and the tree that was also me was destroyed. I was burnt and hollowed out and ashen. I didn't want to die, but I didn't know who or what I could be now, in this strange disorienting landscape: exposed to the elements, without strong leafy branches overhead.

Being at the Mountain felt like new life sprouting up through cracks in charred, blackened wood. The soil our marriage grew in is still there, still full of life and possibility, and our roots were protected in the darkness. The nurture I soaked up as a young person in North Carolina is still real, and can be part of my life moving forward. What a relief, what a blessing, to be reminded that I don't have to make all this shit up. That moving forward without Mike does not mean leaving the place where our tree flourished; that the same place can surprise me, nurture me, and thus my children, still.

What I - and we - have now is definitely not a tree. It is not even a sapling. But it isn't dead either; there are weird mushrooms clinging to the burnt bark, vibrant wildflowers growing in the ash-enriched soil, and tiny tree shoots here and there. There is a whole world pulsating beneath the surface -  bacteria multiplying, worms tunneling - unseen and mostly unknown even to me. I have no idea what kind of organizing vision is at work here. Who and what and how I am without Mike remain open questions.

But through it all the strange green air of time is moving, making connections above and below, and setting this tender wreckage aglow.

diminished

Once upon a time, there was a twenty year old girl sprawled on the warped wooden floorboards of her college bedroom, curling the pale blue plastic cord of the phone which she had dragged from the hall into her room around her fingers and holding the phone so close that her ear was red and warm but that didn't matter; she would have liked to become one with the phone so that she could merge with the hushed tones of Michael Brogan's voice that magically sounded from its tiny holes. She gripped it to one ear and rolled her cheek along the floor towards the little carved feet of her dresser, saw the dusty tumbleweeds huddled beyond them, the impersonal black base of the halogen standing lamp, felt the edges of her hip digging into the floor, knew herself to be in an apartment in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania shared with roommates who likely had communication needs of their own on the other side of her bedroom wall, and all of these things seemed unreal, pale and watery, in the presence of the enormous, big, exhilarating, unbelieveable love she felt leaping in her heart.

Loving you makes me a better me. 

Maybe Mike said it first. Something to that effect. He and I confessed to each other that night that something about our love seemed to bring forth the best in ourselves. Something we might not even have known was there before we met each other. We were so earnest, struggling to tell the truth, which in turn made us so vulnerable, which in turn made me at least feel as if I was participating in the kind of extreme sport that I would never in fact actually consider (base jumping? hangliding?) in which one is falling through the sky with no net on purpose. 

Yesterday was Father's Day, which I tried to ignore because being a fatherless widow solo parenting her three bereaved fatherless children on Father's Day sucks. I was doing okay with it, I thought, but as the day wore on I felt more brittle, less capable of being the kind of mother I would like to be, and when we stumbled over to our dear friends' house after dinner to play a new game I collapsed, belly-up, onto their couch and tried to act totally fine (just tired, that's all!) which lasted for about ten seconds. As soon as my friend looked at me with concern I burst into tears.

Why? Because I can't be me and Mike for the kids. I know, it just is what it is. Accept it, right? But I am so sad for my children. They are missing out on so much. They are missing out on something I can't give them, and what I can give them seems so paltry sometimes.

I sobbed incoherently about my fears of not being good enough. Not good enough to keep up what Mike and I had started together with our children. It hurts to say it out loud.

I am, incidentally, blessed with very wonderful friends.

Today I think I understand better why I can feel so ill-equipped to give them what they need. We were onto something in that rushing-recklessly-through-the-air conversation twenty-one years ago. Mike brought forth something in me, something better. What was it exactly? Intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, laughter, curiosity, ambition, boldness. Stuff like that. Stuff that sounds so luxurious now. A newfound ability to name the truth, to put aside irony and politeness and falseness and just say what I really meant about the most important things: life, death, God, art, love. Not that it wasn't complicated between us; not that we always provided a clear pathway to facilitate each other's becoming with grace. Uh, no. I mean, sometimes, but that's really hard to do. He did call to certain parts of me though, parts I might have been uncertain about sharing before Mike, and let me know they were good.

So it's not just that my kids lost their papa. They lost the mama that their papa inspired and supported too. They lost the better me.

That sounds bad, I know. Worry not. I do value myself. I know I've gotten us through a lot of super hard stuff. (Whoop de damn doo, as Mike and I would say). But I can never be the person I was, the person Mike loved - imperfectly, humanly, completely.

I fear certain windows that he propped open in me are closing. That I will harden into something small, something less without Mike to challenge me, infuritate me, to never let me off the hook. That I will take the path of least resistance, conceding to late bedtimes and snack food encased in too much plastic and even worse chore-enforcement than ever before. Also swearing. So much swearing. Okay, actually, that stuff is already happening. What I really fear is that the passion and commitment with which Mike lived his life and parented his children will be diminished - and by me of all people! I don't know how to truly honor him without him here to invite forth the me that I need in order to do the day-to-day honoring.

That was what the tears were about at the end of the day yesterday. I am afraid the me I can give to my children is so much worse than me I could give them when Mike was alive. And that seems awful. It's bad enough to lose one parent. But when one dies, you necessarily lose a part - a way - of the other as well.

That said, I had a moment in ballet class today that I want to tell you about. I can only manage to make it to this class occasionally. It is wonderful, and it is humbling. I mean, wow. Really very extremely humbling. Wow.  Bending my knees and pointing my toes turn out to be near-impossible feats. But I am finally following the teacher's sequences a bit better, and feeling a little more comfortable taking up space at the barre. Normally I stand along one side of the wall, a spot from which I can't see the mirror, which I am grateful for because the way doing barre work feels internally would suggest an external result that it would be best not to dwell upon. But anyway. Today I arrived a little late and grabbed the only spot left, in a different part of the room with excellent mirror access. I also stood at the end of a line of dancers, meaning there would be no one to watch in front of me when we turned to do the other side. Oh boy.

Here is the interesting part: it was okay. There was confusion, but not too much. And when we turned to face the barre I could not avoid seeing myself in the mirror. There I was, and I was dancing. Me! I can't explain the surprise I felt. All this time I thought I had been clumping around with my long flat feet and bowed legs, which is still true, but there was another part of the story I hadn't been able to see before today. I'm awkward and graceful. I'm soft and hard. I lose heart; I keep going. I grip the barre; I find my core. I begin again. All of it counts. I can dance.

gratitude

Everything is exactly the way it should be, he said.

It really is, this particular friend continued, smiling earnestly, looking for eyes to meet and drill home his point. This day is so beautiful. No one is sick. We're all here together. We should appreciate perfect times like this.

I looked down. I felt my throat close up. Everything is not exactly the way it should be, though who could reasonably object to his gratitude? It was Sunday and I was about to practice yoga beneath a stand of river birches on a golden May morning, gathered with a group who are warm and welcoming and well-established in their friendships and with whom I sometimes, depending on my mood, understand myself to be a charity case, a strange interloper with bad skin and ready tears in their healthy-happy-beautiful midst. 

We were in a shady corner of a tree nursery that belongs to one of the families in this group. Children of varied ages were milling around, putting together plates of bagels and lox at a table set up nearby. I prayed Beatrice would find a way in socially with the other kids and allow me this interlude, and she did. We unrolled our mats in the grass. A tiny speaker filled the air with languid reggae. The sunlight moved back and forth across my face, quiet in warrior 2, as the breeze gently ruffled the leaves of the birches. The roots beneath my mat pushed against my forehead as I rolled it back and forth in child's pose. Flies buzzed contentedly and settled on my ankles in downward dog; I blew them away and saw the blue sky overhead. We rested in savasana in the warm prickly grass. Yoga is a safe place for me; wherever I am, whomever I'm with, those movements bring the comfort of home.

But there's that time before and after the practice. Through it all those tears sat in my throat. Everything isn't the way it should be. Not for me. It truly was a glorious morning, but the greener the season, the deeper the gray.

Beatrice ran over during yoga, carrying her flip flops which were splattered in salsa because her brother is sloppy with tortilla chips. What to do? I directed her and returned to a twist. In lizard pose I looked up to see Gabriel running past, absorbed in a game, looking impossibly tall and old, his long hair flopping rhythmically with his footsteps. Like a teenager. How Mike would love to see them in their long summer bodies. They were doing just fine, despite my worries that they'd feel uncomfortable in a new place. Until of course Gabriel started feeling awfully itchy (walking through poison ivy will do that) and desperate to go home and Beatrice was starving because she refused to eat anything and they both reminded me that they always hate farms. Oh. Right. Later that afternoon we visited with a dear friend on his way to New York, and that evening had dinner with my mom in her garden. It was good. But the tears were stuck.

On Monday it was Memorial Day. After breakfast, on a whim, while Gabriel and Frances slept, Beatrice and I made a terrarium using the glass bottle I found to house a birthday terrarium for Mike years ago; in this one she selected a tiny fawn to nestle in the moss. Later I walked Beatrice to her piano lesson. Her kind teacher asked me if this was a hard day, full of memories of fun family traditions with Mike. Maybe she picked up on my heaviness. No, I said, no. No fun memories of pools and barbeques. It's fine.

But those tears eagerly crept upwards as I said it's fine. I had to wait for them to slide back down to their crying waiting room just behind my clavicle and pick their knitting back up before I could safely speak again.  

We walked to the market. Beatrice took her scooter and Frances met us for chocolate chip cookies outside. I lugged milk and yogurt and eggs home. I mowed the lawn. I pulled the heavy plastic drape off the grill that came with our house and that I have never once used and tried to turn it on while Beatrice and Gabriel watched, bemused. No go. So much for my hazy plan to make pizzas outside. Our neighbor, a rather fit lawyer, came outside and began energetically scraping and cleaning off his grill eight feet to my right. I tried a few different things while attempting to exude dignified capable parenting (rather than pathetic-weepy-widow-who-cannot-handle-a-manly-gas-grill vibes) but alas, I couldn't get our grill to wake up after its long sleep. 

My mood was plummeting. There is nothing comparable to the pure bereavement I feel when trying and failing to tackle typical dad chores in public. Mowing the lawn, dragging out the trash, using (or failing to use) a fucking grill. 

Then, just to rub it all in, Beatrice leaned over and brightly asked if we could take out her new hand-me-down bike and have our first bike-riding lesson at the park. I sat back on my heels in the bright sun and squinted at the grill instructions printed on the inside of the base and felt the sweat adhering the backs of my legs together. Um...Beatrice...did you happen to notice I'm not your papa? And did you forget that he's the one who does that kind of thing? And that I will just get testy and irritable and you'll lose your patience and probably start crying and the bike will topple over and you'll scrape your ankle and there will be no band aids and strangers will watch us and judge and the whole thing will suck so bad? 

But I didn't say that. Instead I said: great idea!

We abandoned the grill and pulled out the bike. I couldn't make the front tire move. I mustered my most superhero-like reserves of strength and fussed with the problem until I fixed it. But that didn't really help my mood. I didn't care that counter to all reasonable expectations I had single-handedly fixed a Mike problem because I don't want to fix Mike problems. I want him to fix them. I don't want to be a brittle single mother limping along through fun Memorial Day weekend activties.  

(Mike always said he hated fun. And he did! But he was a good teacher and patiently guided the kids through many firsts; he would have enjoyed teaching Beatrice to ride a bike.)

We went to the park. It wasn't as disastrous as I feared, and when she'd had enough I coasted down the grassy hill on her tiny bike to the playground where Beatrice proudly showed me how well she can do the monkey bars (a new skill) and we spent some time swinging and I couldn't get over how damn resilient she is. And cute. Frances had put make up on her earlier and she was so tickled that she had on eye shadow at the park. Scandalous! Like, anyone might see! And they'll think, oh my goodness, does her mother let her wear make up and she's only six? (Trying to capture her musical kindergarten cadence here).

We came home. Everyone was a bit limp with the humidity and draggy feeling of the late afternoon. I vacuumed. I put in a load of laundry. I began making dinner and everyone started asking me for things at once: could I open this water bottle, did I see the journal brought home from school yet, could I make a snack before dinner, could I watch this trick. Suddenly, the terribleness of it all hit me then with such force - as grief does, it will knock the wind out of you - that I couldn't beat it back a moment longer. I bent over the cutting board and cried. 

Why are you crying Mama? said Bea. Because Papa died?

Yes. It's okay. But I need five minutes.

The girls were in the kitchen. Gabriel and a friend were playing upstairs. I didn't know where to be alone so I went where all mothers who can't hold it together for another single minute go: the bathroom. I slid the door shut and sat on the cold tiled floor and leaned against it and sobbed. Moments like these illustrate the aptness of the expression wracked by grief. It hurts. When I get that overwhelmed I talk to my husband. 

I can't do it, Mike. I can't. I can't do this anymore. I know I'm really strong and blah blah blah but actually it turns out I'm not and I can't and please come back. 

It's so lonely, being a widowed parent. It's damn lonely, and wrapped in the black paper of that particular day's nadir I felt incapable. Terrible at this solo mothering gig. Fucking up left and right. Mike, Mike, I can't do this. Please help. 

Beatrice kept calling for me while this was going on so I went back to the kitchen. Frances walked to me and held out her arms for a hug.  I kept on crying, hard. Who are these children of mine, who readily volunteer to help me carry the sorrow and loneliness, who can tolerate and even accept a mother who cries? 

They are Mike's children! How many times have I said that I don't know what I would do if it weren't for my kids? It never really occured to me in all the times I have asked Mike for help since he died, that alive or dead he has always been a very real and very big part of the three people closest to me. They have his emotional wisdom. They have his humor. I love them so much.

After the Big Cry with the girls the heaviness lifted. The tears had finally been dislodged. I finished making dinner. We sat down and had an absurd, hilarious conversation about all the types of men I am not allowed to date (racists, magicians, and hair gel enthusiasts give up hope now) - if I should ever feel ready to date, that is. We cleaned up. We went outside and I put the bricks some of the the kids had painted while the adults practiced yoga on Sunday into our garden path while Beatrice and Gabriel fought each other in a crazy game with pvc pipes and paint stirrers that they had fashioned into disturbingly realistic weapons resembling bayonets and a basketball. There was a lot of screaming and laughing. I deadheaded the asters and told them to stop pointing their pipes at each others' faces. The light was fading. I could hear neighborhood kids in the alley on their bikes. 

Beatrice will join them someday. When I felt so gloomy and overcome by sadness, I was trapped by a sense of my own futility, trying to operate like a normal person in the thicket of my own grief. I can't do this. And it is true that I can't do this like I once did. Yet puttering in the garden dusk I realized that in fact I had accomplished about a hundred things on Monday, some of them while crying (which need not detract from the accomplishment). They were small things, mundane things, but meaningful things; the kind that make a house a home, and a collection of people - imperfect, lovable, muddling-along people - a family. 

lost worlds

In this, the first spring in our new home, we have planted a small garden. There are peas climbing with wild determination up purple yarn that I slid through the metal loops anchored to the wall of the garage and staked to the ground with takeout chopsticks. There are lettuces that we have harvested for two whole salads thus far. There is a tidy strawberry patch featuring six demure white flowers waiting to magically transform into six tiny strawberries that a squirrel will eat before we find them.

And all around our little rectangle of baby foods at the back of the yard is a beauty that shifts every day, an established flower garden that the previous owners tended for years before we arrived. Before Mike got sick exactly four years ago, before Beatrice was born two years before that, they were planting iris bulbs and allium and tulips and clematis. They were babying the lilac tree and building a fish pond. They didn't know that we were coming - they didn't know that our path of illness, uncertainty, and loss would one day lead us to their idyllic backyard. And yet, even so, their work is a gift to me every morning when I wake up and check to see what is blooming today.

Who would love this? Mike would love this. He was a passionate gardener. The two homes we owned together had very little going on in the way of landscaping when we arrived and he created beautiful spaces from scratch.  He loved the idea of being a steward of the land - whether it be a postage stamp front yard in the city or a sprawling yard in the suburbs - he wanted to nurture native plants, foods, flowers, and tender trees that would live on and beautify our neighborhoods long after we had left them.

So I am happy for the established flower garden, and happy for the chance to plant something new, because it is a tether to Mike and our old life. He was the real gardener - the soul gardener. We just do our best.

Last weekend we went to Annapolis. Our dear friend was delivering the commencement address at St. John's graduation and I wanted to see it. I realized enough time had passed that I wouldn't know any of the graduating seniors - nor would Mike - and this was both relieving and devastating. None of them would run up to me with concern and sadness in their eyes. I could be anonymous. But then again, how could I possibly be anonymous? How could life in this community go on so seemlessly without Mr. Brogan?

It was the first visit that was not occasioned by a traumatic purpose: no moving out of the old house, no post-death business to attend. We stayed with Katie and Chester and had Taco Saturday the night we arrived, as we had together at least two hundred times before Mike got sick. I drove past Frances's old school, visited old friends, parked behind Danielle's minivan in her driveway and walked right into the kitchen as I once did every day to pick up baby Beatrice after work. My minivan sensed that I was a bit wrecked by all this and nosed itself in all the right directions without my having to remember where to go. All I had to do was sit in the driver's seat and rest my hands on the steering wheel; it took care of the rest.

It poured all weekend. Graduation was thus held indoors and I sat up front and watched all the faculty process in, many of whom I had not seen since Mike's diagnosis. I'm not sure they all recognized me with my now-big kids and without my husband at my side. The past president walked up to me afterwards to congratulate me on my performance, thinking I was an actress he had seen in a play recently.

But Robert's speech was perfect. I don't think I'm exagerrating. It was perfect. It captured what is so special - so idealistic and beautiful and never-cynical - about the experience of learning and growing at St. John's, and reminded me of why we had to move to Annapolis so Mike could be a part of that. It was worth the sacrifices we made. Mike was a really good tutor. I cried on and off throughout Robert's speech in recognition of that: this is what he had, this is what he lost when his illness took him away from work, this is the place that - whether or not everyone there knows it - is dimmer, less complete, without him.

Yesterday I read some of the Homemade Time posts from 2011. Just ended up there, moving through that year in our lives story by story, feeling sadder and sadder. Who was that woman? I can barely remember what it felt like to be her. I was yearning for more all the time then: more beauty, more truth, more community, more connection, more love. I had enough energy to take care of two little ones all day and then have plenty left over to imagine everything I would like to give them, to debate things like school and church with Mike, to think about craft projects and cooking challenges for the next day, to wonder about my place in the world. I spent so much time with Frances and Gabriel. We made so many things. We read so many books! Candy was for special occasions; videos were rarely and judiciously permitted; everyone was in bed by 7:30.

I know it wasn't perfect. But it was an ambitiously quiet, creative, bookish life.

Can you blame me for comparing their experience to Beatrice's? If you asked her, she'd probably tell you her favorite tv show was The Office. She begs for ice cream nightly. She mimics the adolescents around her with impressive accuracy. We read before bed, but that's about it, and she was up until ten last night, hollering every few minutes at me that she was scared and absolutely could not fall asleep. I just hollered back, because I was feeling sick and too exhausted to employ the every-five-minute bravery marble behavioral technique I've been using for the past two nights: I know you are, and I know you can do it!

Where are her tender, quiet hours spent arranging bits of yarn and cardboard? Who will she be, with no Papa stretched out on the couch reading King Lear and Aristotle and The Brothers Karamazov, modeling the joys of a contemplative life as he did for her brother and sister? I would get so annoyed at him, oblivious to the encircling chaos while I tried to make dinner. The only sound that got his attention was a grammatical error: he'd abruptly lift his head, look towards its source, and with his characteristic, infuriating authority say, "fewer, not less" before returning to his book.

What I now realize is that I cannot make dinner - and mow the lawn and pay the bills and bring them to the dentist and help them with their homework - and model the joys of silent, focused reading. I can't do it all. I have no one to show them the treasures of quiet, focus, contemplation, comfort and stillness in being at home. I have no one with whom to show them the challenges and joys of marriage, of partnership, of balance. It's just me, and I am one-half of what they used to have. The loss to who they were, are, and will be is staggering.

I worry they have been stiffed in a way that I cannot possibly make up for. I have none of that excess of energy and ambition that I once gave them, and Mike, and our little community. Nowadays it seems I use everything I've got getting us through the day as best I can.

I know our family is in a different developmental moment than we once were. A lot happened during the crisis-laden cancer years. My big kids are now independent, identified with friends and interests, heading off to an activity most nights of the week. Our dinners are quick and simple so they won't be late to soccer. And Beatrice, as the youngest, would be getting dragged around with them whether or not Mike was alive.

But. But Mike isn't reading on the couch. Or tending the garden. Or taking them to the lab or a concert at St. John's on the weekend. If he hadn't been taken from us, I might not be as thoughtful about creating a home and supporting our kids as I once was, but I think the person I am now would be more continuous with the person I was then. My body and heart and soul would be more spacious. The relentlessness of grief, the responsibility of being the lone parent, and the task of making us into a new kind of family shrinks that space. There's less room for yearning. There's less for setting boundaries in order to make a nurturing space apart from the noise and violence of consumer culture for my children to find peace within. I simpy don't have it in me to create the family space I once held with Mike.

I can't be a father and a mother. I can't be Mike and me. Hell, these days I can barely be me. Without him, I have to do so much more, and I fear, as a result, be so much less.

While there are plenty of things I wish Mike were here now to do for this family, more than any of it, I wish he were here to be. I wish my kids could have the gift of growing up in the presence of his unique and precious being.  Can you blame me for worrying I will fail them?

the fair and the show

Every May there is a fair down the street at Buchanan Park, and every year that we've been here since we arrived in the wake of Mike's diagnosis I have taken the kids on Wednesday night, the first night, when good vibes abound and the whole neighborhood hits the cotton candy and the scrambler and walks home with little flashing goldfish who may live one night or a thousand in clear plastic containers. One year Mike was well enough to come along and squeezed into a couple of kiddie rides with Bea. This year, I got home from work just as Gabriel was returning home from his guitar lesson. He wolfed down a snack and ran out the door to meet his friends. Frances was at a school event and made it there much later. I picked up Beatrice from ballet at six, brought her home to change, and then walked down towards the lights and music.

Recently Beatrice asked me, have you noticed how I'm afraid of everything lately? Did you notice that I always have to call for you and ask you where you are when we're at home, even if I know you just went into the bathroom? Yes, I have noticed that, I said. I think it's why I can't fall asleep at night, she added. I'm too scared.

She clings and pulls on my arm when we go places with so much ferocity that it hurts. She digs her nails into my hands. I've taken to walking next to her with my arms resting on my head so she can't yank. At the fair it was no different. She wanted to go on the ferris wheel like we did last year, and as the line inched us towards the the benches that slowly descended, swinging gently, she clung harder and harder. When we got on, she squeezed my hands and immediately begged me to take her off. At the top she screamed to be let off. I convinced her to stay and give it a try; she managed to stop screaming, but it wasn't easy.

I had bought her a wristband so she could ride as many rides as she wanted. We walked all around the fair, stopping to say hi to friends, taking in everything, deciding what would be fun to try. I would spot Gabriel sprinting by with his friends every now and then. The more we looked around, the more tightly Bea clung. She pulled me in this direction and that; she rejected every suggestion with increasing anxiety. I was getting so irritated. I had to continually pull my arm away from her. Come on. This is fun. This is the fair! So many of our friends are here, enjoying themselves! We can too.

But she couldn't. Nothing was right. Everything was scary. I tried to get her to try the teacups with her brother, who I had somehow pinned down for the moment.

No no no. Only you.

But I'll throw up if I ride the tea cups, I explained. Gabriel won't.

But I only want you.

I felt exasperated. I stood in the middle of the fair and looked at Bea with her missing teeth, her dirty feet in plastic flip flops, her big pleading eyes, and some stubborn angry part of myself abruptly gave way. I asked her what snack we should get.

She lit up. Kettle corn!!

I bought a big bag. We walked out of the fair, into the quieter park that surrounded it, and decided to sit under a tree just on the periphery of the action. We settled on the damp grass as darkness fell, Beatrice finally relaxed and leaning against me, sharing an open bag of sweet and salty popcorn and watching unseen as our friends and neighbors walked in and out of the fairground. She said, Mama, this is the best part of the fair. I'm having such a good time with you.

I smiled. It definitely was. It was as if I finally accepted that we don't quite belong in the midst of all those lights and games and happy families. Rather than force our participation in something that felt wrong, we took our place in the dusky outer edge. I watched with a kind of contented sadness as couples we know whose children are off at college walked by hand in hand, aglow with nostalgia for fairs gone by, and younger families we know wrangled their exhausted toddlers into strollers, and all of it was happening over there, lit up by the rides and games, away from us, sitting among the safe, sturdy roots of a very old tree in the dark.

It makes me think of Lear.

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.

10We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

15Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon ’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out

In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones

20That ebb and flow by the moon.

When you are grieving you are God's spy, sitting apart in your prison, watching it all go by, knowing you are no longer a part of court happenings as you once were but somehow closer to the mystery of things. That kettle corn was my offering, my way of kneeling down and asking Beatrice's forgiveness, so we could nestle together on our perch and watch the stories unfolding below.

There's so much I want to do. I get frustrated with her anxiety and fear, her clinging, along with the weight of all my children's grief, the million things I haven't done - the emails I've neglected and plants I haven't watered and milk I haven't bought - the enormity of tending this family without Mike while my heart is so broken. I long to go to this party, that play, a retreat on Sunday, a yoga class, a drink with a friend, the couch with a book, a manicure, a concert. So little of it happens. My kids need me. Maybe I need me too. My golden birdcage prison calls me: come inside, you don't really belong in that world anyway, you feel alien and strange at the art show, the fair. Come snuggle with Beatrice and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, give her your arm, accept the confines of this new life.

Tonight was the school art show. It's a wonderful event, full of art and music and friends. Frances performed. I volunteered at the snack table (after hearing repeatedly how I am the *only* parent that doesn't volunteer at school) and when there was a lull in the action, I wandered the show and took pictures of the kids' art boards. It was a habit. I had always texted them to Mike, who never seemed to be well enough for this event and would be waiting for us at home.

After I took the photos I realized with dismay that I had no one to send them to. I wandered back to my post. I felt lost and tried to busy myself. I thought about sending them to a friend but that seemed lame. A man introduced himself to me, explaining we had gone to high school together. It took me a minute, but I recognized him. His daughter is in Beatrice's class. I smiled and chatted and felt that my lostness - my questionable departure from my prison cage - was as obvious as if I had busted handcuffs dangling from my wrists. Yeah, we went to high school together, we're both pretty nice people, we have six year old daughters, we're both forty-one years old, but I belong back in my cage with my grieving freaked out little girl while you are at your ease in this beautiful room with your wife and your health and your plans to go out for ice cream after the art show.

Then Beatrice, the grieving girl in question, tore past, deep in a game with her friends from school, shrieking and sweaty. Unlike her mother, she didn't look like an escaped convict at all.

Afterwards Frances went to a friend's house and Gabriel was out playing Magic so it was just the two of us again, reading in bed, when we heard booms and crackles outside. We opened the door to the upper balcony off her bedroom and sat outside, Beatrice nestled on my lap, watching the fireworks being set off at the fair down the street. We had a perfect view up there. It was beautiful.