monkey business

This morning while hovering over my yoga mat, propped on my fingers, I proceeded to flop, scoot, and inch one leg out in front of me, descending into a rather inelegant, uncomfortable version of hanumanasana, which is fancy sanskrit talk for a split. I felt the weird nervy pinch in my hamstring that has been happening with discouraging regularity for the past year or so, making certain poses that used to be a comfort to fold into no longer accessible in the same way. Sliding into a close approximation of a split was something I used to do with relative ease and, I confess, not a little self-satisfaction. I may not know much, but at least I can do this. 

No longer! Maybe it will come back; maybe not. Maybe my forties will bring forth other party tricks I didn't even know I could do. Aging is so weird.

Anyway, I leaned over and wedged a block under my front thigh and tried to settle in. Not so much. I leaned over and found my blanket, fumbled with it for a minute, stacked that on top of my block, and tried again. As I fidgeted, everyone else in the class seemed to be breathing peacefully in hanumanasan stillness, and the teacher reminded us of the myth behind the pose: Hanuman is a Hindu monkey god, a symbol of great devotion, famous for his epic leaps performed in selfless service to Rama. In one story, he leaps from one island to another, all for love.

Then she said, four more deep breaths in this pose.

I started to cry.

Since Mike died the tears come in savasana with some regularity, but I rarely cry during the active part of a yoga class. Today, I noticed the sharp pain in the back of my thigh; my splayed, white fingers digging into the brick-colored mat on either side of my leg, attempting to relieve the burden of my thousand-pound hips; my spine trying to find length and then curling in on itself in exhausted defeat, and I knew I could not leap all the way from my island to Mike's island. I do not possess the courage and strength to make that single, graceful bound. I cannot bear the pain of it. I am no monkey goddess; my devotion falls short. I am an aging, imperfect human who used to be a wife and I need a stack of blocks just to tolerate four deep breaths in Hanuman's heroic pose.

It probably hurt Hanuman's legs to leap from one part of India to another. It probably hurt a lot. He may have had his own weird pinchy nerve pain. But he didn't dwell on it, because he was so focused on the object of his loving devotion.

I am afraid that I am not leaping towards Mike. Or rather I am afraid my leaps are heavy-footed, graceless; limited by my intolerance of pain, my distraction, my own self-pity. I am afraid they propel me no closer to my husband on his unknowable island. And I am afraid that if I don't reach for him, he will leave all over again. Cancer took him from me the first time. What if my failure to be a devoted widow takes him farther from me still?

I didn't know I was afraid of failing to hold Mike close until I started crying in hanumanasana.

Two days ago I found a box labeled "Mike's special items" in the basement. Since October, just after we moved, I had been attempting to look for that box, then panicking when I couldn't find it within minutes and abandoning the search, then trying again a week or two later. I felt sick whenever I considered that I didn't know where it was, but I felt sicker when I started looking for it. But then, miraculously, I found it over the weekend without even trying. I opened it on the kitchen table and there was his watch, his St. John's baseball cap, a handkerchief I had clumsily embroidered his initials on many years ago, his rosaries, his glasses. His glasses were smudged with oils from his hands and face. He was wearing them up until moments before he died and I had handled them very little since.

We had picked out those frames together while Frances and Gabriel waited patiently, slouched across a brown leather couch in an Annapolis optometrist's office, reading Harry Potter. I wasn't even pregnant with Beatrice yet. Mike wrung his hands over the expense. They were fancy. Danish. They looked fanstastic on him. I finally convinced him to elbow the frugal part of himself out of the way and just go for it. He was so handsome in them.

I took stock of those precious, intimate objects nestled together and I felt them all accuse me: you left us in a box. You didn't even know where we were. You haven't touched us in months! You are letting him slip away from you.

I put on his watch and put the rest of it back in the box and set it down next to my bed, uncertain how to honor these understandly angry treasures.

Long before he got sick, Mike was afraid that if tested, he would lack physical courage. He sometimes had nightmares about being in a foxhole, or a post-apocolyptic scene, or some kind of accident in which he needed superhuman strength and courage to save one of the kids. They were masculine anxiety dreams; murky, unconscious worries that he would falter when it came time to run inside a burning building.

But me, I worry more about my lack of spiritual courage. I'm afraid of God, or rather I'm afraid of looking too closely and discovering the frailty of my own heart before God. I'm afraid of the terribleness of my grief. I'm afraid of the pain inside. I'm afraid to take four deep breaths in hanumanasana.

Part of me knows I don't have to grasp and cling to Mike to keep his spirit with me. I've written here about how I learned that I needed to trust Mike's love for me when he lived on earth, and that I grew in that trust. Now I am being asked to trust my love for him and our love for each other. I suspect it isn't the kind of thing that will evaporate if I don't consciously revisit it, forcefully leaping towards the living Mike and our life together.  I suspect it isn't really up to me, in the end. Love just is, it can't be pushed and pulled, at least not with any peace.

I started going to an adult ballet class on Monday mornings. I hadn't taken a class since I was fifteen and was so nervous the first time I went, back in December. The teacher is wonderful. She is rather old and graceful. She dresses all in black, has beautiful posture, and wears her silver hair in a smooth, taut ponytail. I really want her to like me - or at least to tolerate my clumsiness and tendency to  grip the barre for dear life, the desperate tension evident in my wrists and knuckles as I try to get through a sequence of tondues. So when she approached yesterday before class got started and asked me about the chain of social connections that led me to her class, I basked in the attention. I explained who we had in common, how lucky it was that I'm off on Mondays, how I found my old slippers.

Everything is connected, she said.

Yes, I agreed.

She paused in thought, dropping her chin. Sometimes, she said, peering down at me over the tops of her black-framed glasses with a knowing look, it's unfortunate.

Is it ever. I bend my knees in a plie and my lower back hurts. I lie in corpse pose and cry. I see one of the children make a particular gesture and my knees buckle. Hanuman was trying to teach me today. Everything is connected. Sometimes it's unfortunate, because it's painful and awkward and imperfect and definitely not very pretty, and you think you can't tolerate it for one more breath. This contorted leap may be taking me, and the children, to new places, but it doesn't necessarily follow that we are leaving Mike in order to keep moving ahead. In fleeting moments, my heart knows that everything is connected, and love never ends.

nice teeth

Another bit of Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible stopped me in my tracks a few days ago. This time I was reading Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker while I waited for Frances to come downstairs to go to the store with me.

(I should be clear about the circumstances facilitating these brushes with Biblical language, lest you think I am the kind of person who cozies up with a cup of tea and the five books of Moses on a Thursday night after our return from music lessons and the kitchen has been scrubbed clean, emails responded to, backpacks organized, and children tucked into their beds. No, after the kitchen is cleanish - a sad collection of glasses that didn't make it to the dishwasher are huddled together in the bottom of the sink and a pot or two is left "soaking," meaning I cannot bear to confront its cooked-on bits and am leaving it overnight for benevolent elves or more likely my fresher morning self to deal with, and I've said the final, dragged-out goodnights, long after ideal bedtimes have come and gone (Mike always asserted - in the face of bargaining and whining - that we don't negotiate with terrorists. But in his absence I do, Lord help me, I do), I favor the spell of Netflix while folding laundry, or scrolling through social media while feeling miserable and scratching behind one of the cat's ears, or going through old letters or emails or photos of Mike on the floor of my bedroom with tears in my eyes until I finally concede I am exhausted and crawl into bed. I put a Tessa Hadley novel on hold at my local libary a week ago, couldn't find the time or werewithal to pick it up, and realized this morning that I missed my chance. It has already slipped off the hold shelf and sunk back into the depths of the general collection. So I put it on hold again. That's what I call "reading" these days.)

Anyway. It was a metaphor from the famously hot and heavy Song of Songs, one of many illustrating the lover's face:

Your teeth like a flock of matched ewes
that have come up from the washing,
all of them alike,
and none has lost its young. 

I laughed out loud. Oh, Mike. Read this one. It's crazy sexy. Your teeth, like sheep. Like dripping wet sheep who just had a bath. Bring those sheep-teeth on over here, baby.  

Mike appreciated the weirdness of faith; he looked for the strangeness in Biblical language and loved it all the more for its unsettling phrasing. He liked to be caught unawares by an odd comparison or emphasis. He would have appreciated those lines. I would have read them out loud to him, or rather he would have read them to me; he read the New Yorker more thoroughly and promptly than I ever did.

But more even than the pleasure of imagining sharing the Song of Songs with Mike, I laughed - and cried a little too - because I love Mike's teeth. Yes, indeed! They are all alike, bright and square and strong, and though I would never have thought to compare them to a flock of ewes I would in fact compare them to a flock of something. A something that would never lose its young. A reliable, beautiful, consistent, precious something. I wish I could write an ode to Mike's teeth as extraordinary and strange as those lines in the Song of Songs.

I was talking to one of Mike's friends on the phone yesterday and sharing that I have been feeling at a loss at times with the kids; I fear I am letting them down on the parenting front. It isn't easy to know how best to support five, ten, and thirteen year old people when my time is more limited than I'd like, and they are facing the daunting developmental tasks of kindergarten, fifth grade, and middle school, of girlness and boyness, all while holding the burdens of sorrow and disorientation that necessarily come with losing their papa. I wish there was more of me to go around. I wish I knew what to do.

I wish Mike was here.

During his illness Mike often shared with me how powerless and sad he felt because he couldn't do normal dad things like pick up the kids at school, go to work, take them to a birthday party, have a game of catch. Once, around this time last year, after a long bedtime wrangle with Bea followed by fetching his medicine in the kitchen and filling his humidifier and finding more blankets I collapsed next to Mike in bed and he turned to me and said, it'll be so much easier for you. I knew he meant after he died. I told him nothing, nothing, nothing at all could possibly be easier without him. If he died, everything would be harder than I could bear.

Which was true.

When I don't know what to do about one of the kids, most of the time I can imagine what Mike would say. I can conjure his voice and sensibility. I can imagine the things he would do, based on our life before he was sick, and believe me, a little co-parenting would be AMAZING right now. I'd give my left arm to have one of those tense negotiations with Mike, splitting up pick-ups and drop-offs, deciding what to do with a scheduling conflict. Heck, I'd do anything for an early morning fight over who has to go into work late for a snow delay. Running a family is definitely way, way harder alone. But the difficulty lies not so much in the lack of a second driver who is also invested in soccer practice and piano lessons. The loss of Mike's insight and advice - excellent as they were - doesn't get to the heart of the thing either.

It's his being, not his doing, that I miss. The pain of his absence is what makes my knees buckle, and its really hard to get shit done when you're struggling to stand up.

Some of all this was part of that conversation with Mike's friend yesterday. It came up because he was being hard on himself for not doing enough when Mike was sick.

But you were there, I thought. You were with him. He was with you. If my experience of grief is teaching me anything, it is that the fact of one's being is the most precious thing of all. Our doings, in the end, aren't so very important. But it's hard to know that when death isn't pressing down on you.

I was pulled in so many directions when Mike was sick. There were so many concrete tasks to do. I don't get down on myself for being so busy then - I know it was just the nature of my path - but I do mourn the hours and hours I didn't stretch out next to him and listen to him think or sleep or cry and not say anything at all.

I don't need Mike to call one of the kids' teachers, or to tell me what to do in the face of some of the harder and more daunting parenting choices I need to make. He wouldn't know either. Who does, really? What I need is for him to be with me in the not-knowing.

How I long for his Mike-ness. His singularity. His teeth.

The elegant set of his jaw, which would become imperceptibly rigid when he was irritated. I would call him the Metal Man when that happened, a man with jaws of steel, which as you can imagine did nothing to melt the metal away.

His pale, surprisingly hairy, exquisitely unique feet. He called them his hooves. They were wide and short, with square toes and toenails. They were the utter opposite of my shockingly long, bony, brown feet. His hooves, my flippers. A ridiculous pairing of two pairs of feet.

His turn of phrase. His jokes. His surprising capacity to bust out the oldey timey hip hop moves, or a line memorized long before I met him, like basketball is my favorite sport/I like the way they dribble up and down the court, or both. His severity. His levity. His discernment, his psychological acuity, his comfort around children, his peacefulness in natural settings.

His clear eyes. I know that everyone, especially those we love best, has soul-window quality eyes, but it is possible that Mike Brogan's eyes were more extraordinary in this regard than most. They were steady and strong yet open and vulnerable, and possessed of a shifting air/water/sky color that I should not even attempt to describe. At our wedding Mike spoke his vows in a booming, unfaltering voice that I simply couldn't believe. How did he do that? When it was my turn I struggled to make any sound come out of my voice at all. Our priest was a little worried. But what I remember more than the sound of his voice is the look of his eyes, unafraid to meet mine, unafraid of anything at all, full of love and fidelity. A lifted eyebrow, a gaze that held mine, a subtle roll. Mike's eyes always said everything.

I know it's hard to believe, but I think if it is true for Mike, it's true for you, too.

Your weird habits, your limitations, the things you've done and the things you haven't done, the particular planes of your body, the way you sneeze - all of it amounts to a thousand things to love about you. How wonderful it is that you are.