hello future, meet the past

I had a long overdue mammogram this afternoon in the dread Suburban Pavillion outpatient medical center, which is connected to the Cancer Institute by a long shiny hallway that features blocks of rainbow colors on one white wall and long open windows overlooking a parking lot on the other. The entrance to the Center for Breast Health (what a weird assemblage of words) is next to that hall, and to the diagnostic imaging area. 

How many hours did we spend waiting for PET scans and chest x-rays in that open, exposed waiting area, listening to the incessant fountain nearby and watching parents hover over their small children while they hurtled wishing pennies into it with awkward toddler gusto? And how many times did little Beatrice dance down that long inviting white hallway from the Cancer end of things? I would take her for walks to occupy her while we waited for Mike's radiation or chemo to end. She was tickled by the colors.

So was it so weird that when I walked out of the Center for Breast Health, with flattened breasts basically unharmed and hopefully healthy, I turned and headed down the rainbow hall, tugged by habit and a compulsion to visit the past? The fluorescent lights bounced off the linoleum underfoot and the moon was full and rising to my left in the pale purple sky, shining above the cars and scattered ultrasound technicians and administrative assistants and nurses that were hunched against the cold in masks and coats, walking towards them. I traveled the entire hall without thinking much about what I would do when I reached the end of it, until my toes touched a line of thick blue tape and my eyes noticed a sign that said I could not cross it unless screened by a Cancer Institute staff person. 

Well, of course. No one belongs in that space who isn't a patient, caregiver, or medical staff person. I've often thought about people going through what we did now - how much scarier it must be, going in for treatment, battling low white blood cell counts, gauging which fevers to do something about, all within the heightened anxiety cauldron of the pandemic. 

So I stopped. I peered into the Cancer Institute territory, which was calm and quiet. There were no humans to speak of in any direction. I wondered what I would have done if the blue tape hadn't stopped me. Visit the nurses at the infusion center? Check in on the green treatment team downstairs and see if anyone remembered me? Say a cheerful happy new year to everyone through my mask, patients in wheelchairs and therapy dogs and receptionists alike?

But they wouldn't know me. I wouldn't know them. It will be three years in March. And why would anyone want to revisit a chapter of life dominated by cancer treatment, anyway? A person who spent nearly all of that chapter with her husband who is no longer here, maybe. A person who still wonders what exactly happened then, and how, and why it happened too, and is visited by vivid memories of it all at least once a day.

But even though it never leaves me, I can never really go back to it. I sent a holiday card to our old doctor in New York and to the nurse team at the hospital because I'm not ready to let go of those people and places, but my time with them is complete. Bea doesn't remember dancing down that hallway. Frances is thinking about college, and Gabriel is now taller than Mike was. I've gained weight, I sleep at night, the smile lines on my face deepen. Many good and beautiful things keep happening. Time is so strange.

Our family has changed, the staff at the Cancer Institute has surely changed too. The whole world has changed! The pandemic experience in some ways feels like my own writ universal: stress, disease, confinement, isolation, uncertainty, and now, after so much worry and loss, we are all looking to an unknown future with some true hope, not really knowing where we are going or how we will be transformed but trusting nonetheless. 

I get my vaccine tomorrow. 

Happy new year, everyone. I'm taking my mask off to say it, I'm smiling, I really, really mean this: I'm grateful to be moving forward towards the unknown future with all of you.

dogs help

After dinner the other night, I hit a parenting wall. I can't recreate what exactly happened, but I know we were sitting around the table talking before cleanup had begun, and the conversation turned to more painful subjects. There was anger and accusation and open resentment. I'm pretty sure it got ugly, fast. I stood up at a high tension moment to move a pan into the sink and hide my face from my kids, but they could tell I was about to cry, replete with my own barely contained frustration and anger and coming-up-emptiness. I remember that I felt I had nothing. No idea how to handle this argument. I thought it best to stay silent. 

But they could see that I was crumbling. Frances suddenly pivoted and suggested I take a break and go upstairs, they could finish cleaning up. I looked at her blankly. What?

I decided to accept the role of ineffectual broken-down mother and went to my room, where I found Ramona the dog sprawled luxuriously across a pile of clean laundry on my bed. She lifted her head and looked at me standing in the doorway with her soulful eyes for a long spell, then let her head drop back down heavily, exhausted by the effort of momentarily holding it up. This gesture got me. I knew just how she felt. I crawled across the underwear and socks and t shirts until I lined myself up against her back and slid an arm across her warm ribcage. I cried into the little space between her shoulder blades, which happens to be one of my favorite parts of Mike's body, and that made me cry harder.

My dog rolled on her back to face me, belly mostly up (a favorite position, always hoping for a rub) and put her sinewy bony forepaws around me while I cried and yes, scratched her belly. We stayed like that, entangled, and I let all the thoughts come and go in the safety of her doggie embrace. They need Mike. I can't do this alone. I usually feel like I'm doing an okay job as a parent but what if that is a lie I tell myself, what if I am letting them down? What if they need a stronger leader at the helm? What if I indulge them too much? What if I am the weaker parent, and weaker still without Mike's sensibility and presence to inform me? What if 50% of what they once had is simply not enough? 

My dog was the only being in the world I could have tolerated with me at that moment. The aloneness of widowed parenting in these moments of doubt, of not knowing, of wishing desperately for my partner with whom I once shared the responsibility and path-forward-making, is something that reliably shakes me deeply. There is no one alive on this planet who knows and loves our babies like Mike. Only silent, simple, soulful Ramona could have comforted and held me like that. I'm not sure how I managed before, without her.

Gabriel recently commented during a trip to Market that sometimes I treat them more like a grandparent than a parent, getting them all the empanadas and donuts and chocolate milks they ask for, clearly taking pleasure in the indulgence of it all. Oof. That didn't sound great to my ears. They're soft! I'm soft. I started spoiling all of us after Mike died (Who cares? Papa died was a frequent refrain) and once the pandemic hit I cranked it up a few notches. Who cares, it's a pandemic! This is hard, we deserve chocolate milk. And nice beer, and staying up late, and movies, and a huge bowl of popcorn drenched in butter and salt. 

Griefing, parenting. Maybe I've gotten a little too confident lately. I've been all I got this, occasionally looking back and considering how bonecrushingly hard everything was two years ago, one year ago, and reassuring myself that I somehow survived that pain and am in a new phase of our lives. Whew! Good thing that's over. I'm so normal now! But c'mon, who am I kidding? The holidays are upon us, my bones still ache, and the absurd brute unfathomable fact of the death of someone I love, someone my children love, still makes it hard to breathe. 

I'm still afraid of the questions my children ask that I cannot possibly answer, the sorrow they bear that I cannot relieve. I'm still afraid of the holidays. I'm afraid of sustaining and adapting traditions in a way that will fall short of honoring Mike, a great lover of Christmas and general wholesome festivity. Last year we opted to skip it rather than face the wrongness of Mike's absence around the tree; we had a fabulous time in Jamaica instead. 

I do think I'm ready to be here this year. (Good thing, as we can't escape to the Caribbean anyway). In so many ways we are  in a new phase of our lives. We're finding a way to be a family, to be who we are, to grow and change without registering frequent bouts of panic over the inevitable fact of time carrying us farther away from the family and people we were when Mike was alive. There's just occasional panic these days. But there's no being done with our grief. There's no nestling it into a quiet drawer that we close because everything's okay now. It's never okay. We're finding a way to live in the world with the not-okayness, and love it all anyway, love it even more tenderly and ragingly than we did before. 

Thank goodness for Ramona.

open the gates

Six months after Mike died I bought this house. The move - bringing the remains of our old house in Annapolis whose contents we had stored three years earlier, just before Mike was diagnosed, and the household we'd built over the intervening crisis-laden years in Lancaster - was an effort I found so emotionally and physically taxing that at times it felt simply impossible. My knees would buckle and I'd figure it was time to give up, leave the chaos and the artifacts of another life all around me where they lay, and pitch a tent in the backyard. Just call it quits. Too hard, never mind. Kids, start looking for the sleeping bags...they must be around here somewhere. 

About two weeks after we'd moved, I had a vivid dream. Mike was walking through the new house, looking around in dismay, at times in anger, asking me things like why did you get rid of the desk? this room is so small; didn't you realize the couch wouldn't fit? what were you thinking, buying this house? 

In my dream he hated it. In my waking life I hated that he had never lived in it, and now we did.

Last night I had another such dream; Mike was on the periphery during a weird dream-logic vacation and my only direct contact with him involved him being upset with me, noting ways I had changed, responding with some judgment. In the dream moment I remembered that I had a boyfriend. I didn't want to upset my husband so I decided not to mention it. But I couldn't hide the fact that I wasn't the same person he had been married to, because his death had changed me. He could tell, and he didn't like it. 

Terrible dream. Awful. My waking mind does not for a minute think Mike is upset with me for changing. I don't even think he cares too much about the boyfriend; I really do believe he wants me to be supported and happy. But I struggle with accepting these things. My brain twists them into painful narratives at night. 

And yet I notice changes happening inside me, without even trying to make them happen, and I notice that they are good. Beautiful, even. Life is hard as heck but I feel good about my work, my parenting, my friendships; I am kinder to my own body. And then a little part of me says but how can you be more you, more expansive, more accepting of yourself, after losing Mike?! And even scarier: did losing Mike enable you to become more fully yourself? 

And what would that mean about me, about my marriage, about Mike, about us, if it did? 

When my mom had a hysterectomy in her early 50s, she had not yet begun the process of menopause in earnest. After the trauma of that surgery - after an organ in her body that had reminded her of her own fertility for decades, had housed my and my sister's growing bodies and spirits, and had stretched and twisted under the insistent heft of fibroids was removed in a moment with cold metal instruments - menopause was kicked into high gear. She got thrown into it hard, and there was no turning back. She had to figure out how to respond to hot flashes on the fly. 

If her uterus had not been taken suddenly from her body, she would have eased into that change over a span of years. She would have wound up on the other shore eventually; the journey would have been remarkably different.

I think what is happening to me is something like that. My husband was taken from me. He was a person I knew intimately, like an organ in my own body, a part of me so essential that I did not know who I was without him. I fell in love with him when I was an uncertain twenty year old woman-child. There was a lot about myself I didn't like then. He seemed to love me anyway, but I was afraid to expose that darker shameful stuff to the light of his gaze any more than necessary. I loved being in love with him; I didn't want anything about either of us, especially me, to screw it up.

Much later in our years together, those pushed-aside bits started to emerge, to insist on being part of the conversation. Quietly, mostly in the background but also occasionally in loud and inconvenient and interpersonally painful ways, I was trying to change. To brave friction, disappointment. When Mike got sick, that process inside me, that becoming more me, was interrupted, complicated, somehow both sped up and slowed down. 

If being more fully myself would better support him in those awful times, I was into it. Up for the challenge of more honesty, more connection, more vulnerability. If it seemed like swallowing my own pain or anger or hurt would be easier, which was often the case with a beloved man who periodically lost hair and weight and the ability to speak and could barely swallow anything at all, it was hard. I mostly opted for honesty anyway, because I couldn't bear to feel any alienation between us. I'm not sure it was always the right move.

Then he was ripped from my body. Taken from me in a moment. I was thrown into the cold disorientation of grief and there was no way out but through. Actually there is no way out, not really, but there are ways to move forward. And I think after the initial months of shock, the uncomfortable process of being more myself that had hesitatingly begun before Mike's illness was thrown into high gear. Because what else could I do? Who else could I be? I could no longer take refuge within the structures of my marriage. There was nowhere else to turn. 

It was just me in here, and it freaked me the fuck out. 

I have to tell a story about it, you guys. I have to tell and retell this one. (You're thinking no duh, Meagan). I have to figure out why it's okay that I feel less shame and more openness about who and what I am now than I ever did when my husband was alive, when my life fit into easier, more comfortable compartments, when decisions weren't so wide open, when my own values and inclinations and wisdom were integrated within a two-person system. 

I started seeing a therapist, someone adept in the therapeutic approach I've been learning about and utilizing with my own clients over the past two months. In our session yesterday we somehow ended with the image of a gate, the metal kind used to corral animals maybe, like in a rural English village or Vermont farm, rather bucolic, a gate the swings wide on its hinges and opens onto a meadow, green and lush in the autumn evening light. I like the sound of it squeaking a bit as it opens outward. 

I would like to leave the gate wide open like that, always. I would like my mind to learn to make space for truer and gentler dreams. 

mindful moment

I co-led my first mindfulness class of the semester last Thursday, which is, I think it is fair to say, a total scam, as I am a miserable mindfulness devotee and will choose the maelstrom of my thoughts and attendant emotions over cultivating my inner witness 99 times out of a 100. Okay, that's not totally accurate, because I wish I would sit and meditate more, I really do. Maybe my leading Mindful U could be considered aspirational rather than fraudulent. 

I like teaching it in part because for four weeks I have to keep a daily log of mindfulness activities, just like the students, and this built-in accountability helps convince me to cut the crap and just sit down already. 

Even so, I missed Friday and Saturday's required ten minutes of practice, but I did think about it, specifically when I could create a regular, sustainable time in my day during which to meditate, and came up with a great idea: after dinner, I would leave my kids cleaning up the kitchen and slip upstairs to my bedroom, settling onto the floor in the carpeted alley between my bed and the window overlooking my back door and deck, facing the pothos sitting on the bedside table whose drawer holds Mike's watch and cologne and glasses, the plant that once hung from the ceiling in a tasteful macrame net and that I haven't been able to - or rather even tried to - rehang after the plaster fell away around the ceiling hook. While I sat with intention and awareness, the kids would learn to get it done, as I often suggest they do, just get it done please, without me there to complain to when one child is perceived to be avoiding her duties or the sink is full of pre-dinner dishes that none of them apparently have created and eschew all responsibility for. It would go so much better if I weren't there urging them on, and I would be motivated to practice if it meant a smoother post-dinner clean up. 

So after our frittata and tomatoes and cucumbers I explained that I simply had to meditate, and I would be back in ten minutes to help them finish up. I ran up the back stairs to my room and shut the door. I slid Mike's meditation bench out from beneath the table that holds the plant, and opened Insight Timer on my phone. I set the time and proceeded to slide my shins beneath the bench, straighten my spine, and exhale. Yes. Meditating. Making time for me. I love this. Right? I love this.

Within about thirty seconds my children began reciting Hamilton lyrics together at the top of their lungs. Their voices floated out of the open kitchen door below and filled the cool air around our house. The sound, along with clinking dishes and running water, traveled up to me in a way that made their voices sound particularly human, particularly like themselves. I laughed. Oh my god, I love them. They are so funny. 

Wait! Wait just a minute, I'm meditating here. Inhale, exhale.

They then blasted the actual soundtrack to sing along to. I felt vaguely jealous that I was missing out on the fun scene in the kitchen. I couldn't stop my brain from singing along silently too. 

Brah, brah I'm Hercules Mulligan/Up in it, lovin' it, yes I heard your mother say come again

Oof, no. That is, I guess, something I will label thinking.

I heard Ramona roll against my closed door and commence methodically chewing away on her squeakiest toy. 

Hello, breath. Back to the breath.

I heard Beatrice scream at her brother and sister to turn it down, they were being too loud.

I noticed my back aching. Like, all over. Oh man. Does anyone not start to feel extremely uncomfortable about 94 seconds into seated meditation?

My phone chirped many times in a row, in such a way that I knew the texts were from the man I am dating as his staccato voice-to-text style always comes through in multiple parts. 

Thinking, Meagan. 

Don't modulate the key then not debate with me/Why should a tiny island across the sea regulate the price of tea? 

I tried focusing on the feeling of my hands resting on my thighs instead of my breath. 

I then felt the air whoosh against my back as my bedroom door suddenly flung open behind me and Beatrice ran in, standing over me, her long hair tickling my shoulders.

I am sorry Mama, but there is an emergency right now and you are still just SITTING HERE meditating!! Ramona pulled the modem off the shelf by its cord and now the internet is probably broken!

I mustered all my focus and kept on noticing that I was breathing and tried not to smile and kept my eyes closed.

Mama!!! Come ON!

Beatrice, I quietly responded, I am still meditating. My timer has not gone off yet. 

But you've been up here for at least an hour!

Then I did smile. And told her I'd be there just as soon as my ten minutes were up. She ran out, exasperated.

But while we were engaged in this exchange, the door was open, and Ramona ran in and leapt onto my bed next to me, her panting face level with mine. That made me remember I still needed to put clean sheets on my naked mattress.

Thinking! Another thought!

I heard Beatrice yelling again, about something indistinguishable. She sounded like she needed help. Suddenly I couldn't stand it anymore. I opened my eyes to find Ramona's inquisitive sweet doggy face inches from mine, and looked down at my phone. Somehow I'd missed the soothing chimes indicating the end of my session and had been sitting there for six extra minutes. 

Woah. I felt like a total meditation pro. I went downstairs, turned off the music in the clean kitchen to much protesting, and felt my heart animating my chest curiously, with a flutter and an ache. 

Later on, in the course of getting-ready-for-bed conversation, Frances casually observed that I have a low bar for life, which is why I'm so happy all the time. 

You'd probably make a really good Buddhist, she said. 

That made me laugh. Oh, totally. I'd be an amazing Buddhist. Just wait til I hit that bench tomorrow.

you're camping

When Frances was just shy of two years old Mike and I flew with her to visit our friends in Colorado. At the time we knew (deep in our first-time flimsy parent bones, which had not yet been tested by toilet training, toddler rage, vomiting in the night, sibling rivalry, eye rolling, or anything remotely humbling) that she was an absolutely brilliant baby, and one of the ways this was made clear to us was the few baby verbal tics she held onto - adorable abberations that highlighted her genius and enabled it to shine that much brighter - the cutest of these being her confusion around personal pronouns. 

A delighted announcement from the black arms of the baby swing: you're swinging!! meant, of course, I'm swinging. The way she developed this habit made sense. I'd say Frances, are you hungry? And she'd reply, yes, you're hungry. Do you want some? Why yes, you do want some. Mike and I figured she probably had the cognitive abilities of a fourteen year old so we'd patiently try to explain the you-I problem to our chubby baby sitting in the little clip-on seat at the counter, gripping a plastic-coated spoon. Frances, we understand your confusion, but you see, I address you using the word you, but when you refer to yourself, you reply using the word I. Got it?

You got it!

See? Genius! It never occurred to us to instruct her. We could have just said Frances, say I’m hungry. But we wanted her to understand. We didn't want to boss her around like oppressive authoritarian parents and take away her creative linguistic autonomy. Or something like that, I guess. Anyway, we took her to Colorado. And she was the cutest. There were meltdowns, there were all kinds of challenges I'm sure, but time has faded these moments around the edges while leaving some very good ones crisp and clear. One of the most vivid is her utter delight in her own competency. Once she understood that walking on a trail is called hiking, and that that was something she could do, she really milked it. When I see the photo above, I can hear her squeaky little voice announcing to everyone we met, over and over: you're hiking! 

She was so proud. You're hiking! You've got this! You're amazing, you're climbing a mountain!

I often think about you’re hiking. On a challenging trail, or just a long walk around the neighborhood with Ramona the dog, or more often when I notice a kid doing something like flashily riding her bike one-handed or mastering the monkey bars, I smile. You’re doing it, kid. That feeling of mastery, of competence, of one’s own power growing, and smiling to all the world about it. You’re hiking!

Also, announcing to others that you are doing something you feel proud of and referring to yourself as ‘you’ is a kind of neat verbal trick. You’re talking to them, but you’re talking to yourself too. Hey you. I mean me. I mean you/me. You’re pretty great! You’re/I’m doing this hard thing and it’s actually working! It’s telling the story and being the cheerleader of the storyteller and enjoying the support of the cheerleader all at once. 

 

Yesterday afternoon we returned from a camping trip at the beach. Just an overnight, because that’s all the availability I could find during the time we could get away. You see, I’m starting back at work on Monday after my two month summer break. 

Allow me a moment to see that sentence on the screen, breathe a bit, and let it sink in.

Whew. Yes. 

So! On Thursday morning, while Frances was conducting her zoom Spanish tutoring lessons, I pulled all the gear up from the basement and threw all kinds of things into the cooler and lots of sunscreen and towels into the big tote bag and downloaded some audio books from the library and eventually we made it onto the road. I drove us three hours to Cape Henlopen State Park. I put on a mask and talked to the guy at the park about safety and park rules. It was stinking hot. I could hear Beatrice screaming at her brother in the car parked nearby and pretended like they weren’t my children. 

We pulled up to our assigned tent spot which the children found weirdly close to all the other tent spots. No comment. And it’s SO hot. Uh, yeah. And why did you think this was a good idea again Mama? But we were all excited to meet our friends from Annapolis who were already at the beach waiting to see us, and agreed to set up our tent first. The air was thick and still, I was short-tempered with the kids, and all of us were sweating like crazy. The physical exertion required to slide tent poles into those little sleeves and walk back and forth from the minivan with sleeping bags in our arms was enough to leave us dripping. The challenge of then pulling our bathing suits on over our sticky wet skin was considerable. 

But we did it, and we made it to the beach, and we found our friends, and we were so happy to see them and to jump in the waves. Lots of nice things happened; it felt great to be together. But eventually after dinner and some more evening beach time we had to return to our tent. The heat was like another person in there with us, a grouchy humorless person who enjoyed sitting on our faces. We stretched out on top of our sleeping bags, sweating. I read Harry Potter aloud to Bea for awhile, and then we turned out the lights. None of us slept. 

The rain started and it poured and poured. This helped a little with the thick hot air but not much as we had to keep the rain flap up; it was a pretty intense drenching. Every once in awhile one of the kids would whisper are you awake? Oh yes. We’re awake. Occasionally I would slip outside and try to rig the rain flap to allow for some more air flow into the tent, then go back in and watch a gust of wind slap it back into place.

It rained all morning, and all into the next day, and we left earlier than planned. 

But through it all, I would look around, take it all in, and have this feeling that made me smile a little private smile. Meagan. You’re camping. 

The conditions were miserable but we didn’t kill each other. We actually laughed a lot, and had a great time with our friends huddled under a little porch with our Starbucks haul that we went searching for in the morning. I didn’t forget anything important. I found where we were going without incident. The tent kept us relatively dry. And everyone got to put their feet in the ocean even though it’s a pandemic and even though I have to pull off all this shit alone. 

Also my kids are cool people whom I really like spending time with. It feels good to notice that.

We’re still a family. The particular shape of this life of ours is due entirely to tragedy - if Mike hadn’t gotten sick and died we would still be in Annapolis. Beatrice would have lived in one house over the course of her seven years instead of five. I would never have attempted to take the three of them camping by myself. I wouldn’t be soaking in the highs and lows of life in our pandemic pod with friends and watching my kids flourish in their Lancaster community. I didn’t want this widowed life, but I have it, and sometimes I’m really good at it, and sometimes I really like it, and sometimes that doesn’t feel like disloyalty or any other kind of problem at all. It feels like something to be grateful for, and maybe even something to crow about. 

You’re hiking, bitches.   

   

 

wayward time

Yesterday evening I ran up to my bedroom, having just arranged to share burgers outside with my mom and friends for dinner, with the intention of quickly changing and squeezing in some exercise before I had to get started in the kitchen. I peeked into the family room and found Beatrice and Frances sprawled on the couch watching Queer Eye. They looked at me with smiles frozen on their faces.

We can stop this episode here, it's fine Mama.

I looked at them, suspicious. How many episodes had they already watched?

Now I love Queer Eye as much as anyone, maybe more, but I have been on a desperate mission to separate Beatrice from screens for the duration of this pandemic and I feel I am failing even more miserably than usual lately. Since my job has been on break for the summer I have no excuse. I'm not in a session; I'm just talking to a friend on the porch or puttering in the garden or engaging with one of the other children or reading the three-day-old Sunday paper. Because I want to. And trying to ignore the nagging awareness that if I cannot see or hear Beatrice, 99% of the time it's because she's absconded to a quiet corner of the house with a screen.

She's supposed to ask me first. She rarely does. So I was totally, completely annoyed to find her hanging out with the fab five, charming though they may be, without my permission.

I told her as much. I stomped to my bedroom and bent over to step into a pair of running shorts. Beatrice, undettered by my grouchiness, burst cheerfully into the room and attempted a flying leap onto my bed to bring some levity to the situation. She wound up kicking me in the face instead.

I stood up, dazed. My eyes teared up with the impact. I was SO mad. Like, blazing, irrationally, fiercely pissed.

I don't remember what I said, but it was harsh. Her offence most definitely did not merit my response; my irritation was more about my own ineffectual parenting when it comes to screens. The kick sent me over the edge. She fled my room and ran to her own. Then another kid needed my attention, and I got distracted by some other task, and the clock was ticking and I wouldnt be able to exercise after all, and I stomped back down the hall with wisps of steam still drifting from my ears.

Until I saw Beatrice's closed door in front of me, and heard the quiet behind it. Inhale, exhale. I knew I was in the wrong. I peeked in and saw her stretched out on her bed, still and sad. I came in and got in bed next to her. She turned to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. I told her I loved her, and tears unexpectedly filled my eyes. I held her close, and tried to not make any crying noises that would tip her off. It was Father's Day, and what with my youngest child's warm back and easy forgiveness and the floor of her room strewn with slime-making supplies and LOL dolls, and the thoughtful friends who had been reaching out to me since the morning to let me know they saw and honored my loneliness, I simply couldn't not cry anymore. It was a relief.

Beatrice flipped onto her back and looked up at the underside of the bed above us for awhile and then said Mama. Mama. When you cry I feel like crying too. It makes me sad when you're sad. It's like when someone is laughing so hard, and you don't even know why but you have to laugh too.

I know. I know you don't like it.

But Mama, it's okay. I want you to cry when you're sad, because I don't want you to pretend to be happy when you feel bad. You don't have to smile if you don't feel like it.

Thanks. I don't think I do, do I?

You do! But when I feel like crying I can't stop it. I just cry. Even if I'm at school. I hate crying at school.

Ugh, Beatrice, I used to hate that too.

In the months after Mike's death I worried Beatrice would willfully push her father away from her because she had so little tolerance for negative emotions. She'd jump up and put a hand on my lips or tell a joke if she noticed me become tearful. Sometimes she'd just say no crying! like a fed-up schoolteacher barking the rules at a wayward child. I was afraid it wouldn't be worth the sadness of his absence to recall the joy of his presence.

But as we lay warm and tangled on her bed, which is really a mattress on the floor beneath her loft bed because she discovered sleeping up that high was too darn scary, Beatrice told me a different story. She used to find my sadness intolerable because of the way it made her feel. Now she is old enough to recognize that it's worth enduring that discomfort if I am being honest. She wants to know that her mama's insides and outsides match. That she can trust me.

I wish Papa would come back, she said.

Me too, I said.

Then I found something for her to do, and said fuck it and exercised anyway and let dinner be late,  and sat outside on the first summer night and watched the fireflies and talked about dogs and ate mint chocolate chip ice cream sandwiches with some of my favorite people.

Then today I woke up way too early because it was Frances's fifteenth birthday.

Time can be such a bitch, pulling us all along day after day, ever farther from our life as a family of five that shines in the distance beyond the fault line of Mike's death. Gabriel is now taller than I am. Frances is running her own Spanish tutoring business. Beatrice talks about her feelings like a boss and sings along to pop songs. We have a dog who has run away and come home again. Life keeps on happening! It's exhilaring; it's crushing.

Sometimes I wish this narrative arc would bend into a shape that makes a little more sense.

seeing

After I finished my graduate program and had my very first baby, Mike and I moved from Philadelphia to Lancaster. These events happened within a six week period. I was overwhelmed, underslept, and delighted to get to know my hometown in a new way, no longer from the vantage point of a child but with the transformed vision of a new parent.

I started working at what was then known as SouthEast Lancaster Health Services three months after Frances was born, which may have changed my relationship to this diminutive city even more than parenthood. I had many appointment slots every day, and my patients taught me a lot, perhaps most powerfully by offering me a window into the intimate quotidian struggles that come with being poor. They taught me about the barriers to health and mental health care in my town that, even with the aid of my new-social-worker-oblivious-white-lady-can-do energy, were often insurmontable.

That job invited me to sit down with people I had never seen before. These were people I had willfully looked past on street corners, sitting in wheelchairs, walking in pairs carrying plastic bags, hanging on stoops, talking strangely to themselves, wearing their age and chronic illness and poverty in such a way that others gave them a wide, silent berth on city sidewalks. They were part of my city too.

I remember telling Mike a few weeks into that job that I can't not see them anymore. I couldn't not know their stories. I couldn't return to the comfort of my privileged ignorance; the door had been opened and now I couldn't shut it even if I'd wanted to. I saw the poor all around me, and I understood that my looking away had been a form of complicity. It hurt.

What did I do with that new awareness? What am I doing? Getting through the day, mostly. Needless to say I didn't fix our busted health care or organize a new system of accessible mental health treatment. I'm not working tirelessly in service of the underrepresented and underserved.

I remember having a conversation then with a community leader who was visiting our clinic. She sat down across from me and said, without losing eye contact for a moment, that it was time I started serving on a board. Volunteering with more intention and purpose. My town needed people to step up, and I should respond to that need. But, I said, flustered, I have a baby! She's still nursing. And I work full-time. And I'm just figuring all of this out. How could I add anything else?

I think back to that conversation and smile at 29-year-old me. The parent kid ratio in my house then was 2:1. My back didn't hurt in weird places. My hair wasn't gray. I had so. much. energy. Now I'm still working full time, but the ratio is 1:3. My husband is dead, grief freights my every limb, I'm quicker to cry than ever before. How can I add anything else?

The past months have been an exercise in the scales falling away from all our eyes over and over. People in our communities have been hurt deeply; hurt and sometimes killed. We cannot not see it anymore. The #metoo movement ripped a scale away to reveal the brutal ubiquity of misogyny and sexual assault; now the incessant brutality of white supremacy is being revealed in the wake of George Floyd's murder. And the pandemic is exposing injustice in every corner my privileged eyes chose to glide past and thereby condone.

It hurts.

In March and April, isolated and scared and struggling with work and school and a house full of difficult feelings, I found myself sliding back into the sense of alienation and disconnect I felt in the earlier days of my widowhood. I missed Mike acutely. I cried often; the loneliness weighed so much more than usual. I couldn't bear to see or talk with anyone outside my safest people. I wanted to withdraw.

Now my job is on summer break, and school is over, and the weather is perfect. I can breathe again. My loneliness has not subsided, but my resiliency is returning. I am looking around at this beautiful broken world, which somehow mirrors my beautiful broken heart, and recognizing that my own hurts do not mean I am in a worse position to be present to my community. Maybe my suffering has marked me in ways that will help me to serve it; maybe better than I ever could have at twenty-nine.

For now I'm reading, and watching, and listening, and mourning. I'm reluctant to speak in a time when so many seem compelled to speak because I'm still confronting the deep grief and pain the Black Lives Matter movement has invited me to truly see and take responsibility for. I'm feeling a lot of feelings, and waiting. I want my words and actions, whatever they may be, to come from my own pain and love and desire for healing, rather than reactivity. I'm trusting God to help me know how and when to respond to that woman's urgent invitation in my clinic office fourteen years ago, with whatever cracked and bruised gifts I have to share. She really saw me then; I'm grateful to her still.

bright morning star

Last night, in a mad competitive rush for second helpings of an unusual and prized dish around here, one enormous gooey baked mac-and-cheese comprising shocking amounts of butter, cheddar, and gruyere which I couldn't not know about after having made it, one of the four dinner plates broke. We began with six, a gift from my mother after I admired their hand-painted dogwood design in a second hand shop many years ago. Now we have three! Yet we are four. And we should be five. Only three plates! What kind of family can't set a proper table?

Also I dropped my phone Tuesday, when I stupidly took it out to return a text while walking Ramona who predictably lunged for a squirrel at exactly the wrong moment, and now the screen is completely shattered and held in place with two strips of packing tape. I've missed multiple school meetings this week as well as street cleaning/car moving, a handful of emails, and a dentist bill. I forgot Gabriel's well-planned and oft-reminded-about bunk reunion for his special grief camp from last summer. I forgot things I still haven't realized I've forgotten.

Pandemics bring out the worst in me. I know, I know, in all of us - and it's not that we're bad, it's that we're overtaxed and bereft of routines and need human contact to feel normal. So we forget where our keys are and don't show up to meetings. I know. But it feels shitty. It triggers my childhood fear of being imperfect and thus unloveable.

A deeper grief still slips out during my morning walks with Ramona the dog. (I happened to have sought out and adopted Ramona for the express purpose of ameliorating our emotional challenges. Ah well.) Those walks make me wonder if all my surface level fretting about screwing everything up is just to distract me from this particular pain: walking the streets of this town, this neighborhood, being tugged along by my sweet new pup through the hushed morning air, I always seem to wind up on bittersweet corners. I walk by our old house, where my family lived happily, raucously together, and where my dad died in a hospital bed in the living room when I was eighteen years old. I walk by the first house I lived in with Mike, when we had one tiny baby named Frances and he grew a tidy garden. I lost them in the prime of their lives - they were healthy, powerful men, the center of my world, and I had to watch them become sick and die right here.

What the fuck Meagan, you might say. (I say that too.)

Or you might, as Gabriel, observe that God really does keep on smiting you, Mama.

To which I counter, honestly, that I had the very best dad and the very best husband for me in the whole wide world. That doesn't feel like being smited. That feels like fantastic good fortune.

But on those walks the grief over having lost the very best people hits me with an inexplicable freshness. It's searing. Sometimes I cry. This morning, instead, I found myself singing.

bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
day is a-breaking 
in my soul

If you know that song, you know it is a lament, and a quiet celebration too. Oh where are our dear fathers is a bewildered, broken question that hangs and lingers, but then the song comes back again and again to the only answer that makes any sense: day is a-breaking in my soul. 

That's how I feel, walking my dog on the new-day streets of my city where my favorite people died. Cracked open to my grief, and with it the beauty of the pandemic-quiet, the spring that has stepped into full array, the chattering squirrels that Ramona runs after, the neighbors in tight pants and sneakers walking briskly in pairs. Sometimes I have wondered why I didn't take my children and run far away from this landscape that speaks so many painful stories. I think: who would stay here and keep walking these paths?

But it is all very precious to me. I don't want to leave it. On our walks I feel as I did in the early months of widowhood: alien, broken, awed. Like then, the late nights and the early mornings hurt the most. The pain of the whole world pushes on me.

I come home with Ramona and make myself coffee and feed her breakfast and we walk up the two flights of stairs together to wake Gabriel and then Beatrice as the rawness subsides and my day of carrying and anchoring others begins. I make breakfast, and then like parents everywhere I organize Beatrice's schoolwork and set up the computer for her class meetings, I review Gabriel's morning work plan, I set up my own work space. At nine I retreat to the dining room, shut the doors, set my ipad on a stack of books amidst many other papers and books on the table, plug in my ear buds, and begin my first session, hoping the sounds of kids negotiating screens and the dog barking and the dishwasher running on the other side of the door aren't too distracting. I run out between sessions and drag Beatrice away from Netflix and place her before something that makes me feel less awful, say hello to Frances, remind a kid to let the dog out, answer various questions before heading back for the next session. At lunchtime we always take a walk. Sometimes I do something awesome, like yesterday when I felt compelled to bake a lemon rhubarb bundt cake in the morning and did and it was a triumph, and later was present for a very beautiful and sad culminating goodbye session with a student I've seen for a long time. After work I exercise with the kids or alone or with friends distanced outside. This evening I joined some for Zumba which I executed badly, albeit enthusiastically, before countless park-goers, enjoying how little I cared that they saw me in all my confused, hip-shaking, which-way-are-we-supposed-to-be-facing glory. Then we got take-out pizza to celebrate the completion of Frances's first (of three) online AP exams this morning. The days roll on like this, one after another, in our very small world. I dole out hugs and tortilla chips and bandaids and songs and chores and advice and jokes and tears and funny dancing and memories and games and irritation and efforts to meet everyone's needs and help them feel heard and seen. Sometimes I have a pretty good time. Sometimes I feel like a total fuck up. But overall, it goes okay.

Until late, when the last kid is finally in bed, and I stand in the bathroom drying off after a shower or in my underwear with a toothbrush in my mouth and see my own reflection looking back at me, and she is a little confused - what exactly happened here? - and the loneliness comes rushing back. Then I am filled with a scoured out tenderness so deep and so wide that it seems my skin and muscles and bones cannot possibly contain it.

But they do. I never break. I crack and stretch and ache; I expand. It hurts, but I know I am making more space to endure the quiet beauty of the world when I wake tomorrow, click on Ramona's leash, and open the front door.

say yes

Ramona the dog is actually eating. A little. We just got back from our morning walk, our third-ever morning walk, in the early quiet of a pandemic spring morning after a day of ceaseless rain, when all felt washed clean, the cloudy filtered light hitting the wet pink dogwood petals just so, and a scant few runners and fellow dog walkers and even fewer cars shared the streets with us. We adopted her on Tuesday evening, from the Delaware Humane Association. She is nine months old and since her arrival on West Walnut Street has been too excited, overwhelmed, and busy sniffing to be very interested in food or water.

But slowly that's changing. And slowly the cats are considering the possibility that she might be here for good. Beatrice is too. We shared her arrival on Facebook and everyone has been kind and congratulatory; on our walks we always see someone we know who shouts from the other side of the street: the new puppy! Hooray!! So many people have asked things like what made you cave? or you finally gave in, huh? but the truth is that I wanted this dog. The kids were ambivalent. I have wanted this dog since ...well, since the spring of 2015, before Mike got sick, when I was scrambling to rent our house and get us ready to go to England, and Beatrice was just-two. I told Mike we had to do it when we got back from his sabbatical year, when potty training would be a fading memory and his tenure meant we would be in Annapolis for the very long haul (he loved to imagine being a tutor at St. John's well into his seventies; the example set by older tutors who continued to teach and mentor inspired him). A dog could roam our big backyard and delight the children for years and years.

Amazingly, he agreed. What was amazing about his agreement is this: Mike had the most special dog in the world when he was little. Ralph. When he lost his beloved old Ralph at the tender age of six, he made a vow that he would never love another dog again. True to Mike's singleminded, veering-into-obsessive determination, he never did. But at forty, his heart was ready to open the dog-door back up. Just one more of those secondary losses; Mike never got to love our family's dog.

I think he'd be cool with Ramona. Her puppy energy would test him, for sure. But she's a lovely dog, who stops to sniff red fire hydrants and look longingly, ears perked and head cocked questioningly, at other dogs she wants to play with on our walks. I watch her and think: she's acting so doggy. Is this dog really our dog??

I advocated for her starting about two weeks after Mike died. The kids were initially game, and we planned to adopt in the summer, when I was off work. But gradually it became clear that what with selling and buying a house, our general grief-laden state of semi-functionality, lots of travel, and the kids’ aversion to chores, a new dog made zero sense. We adopted the kittens instead, who as you may know have provided us with an inexhaustible source of joy ever since, and limped along as best we could. Every time I revisited The Dog Question, the children would, with varying levels of intensity, object. We’re not ready, they said. Beatrice is afraid of dogs, and the older kids told me in no uncertain terms that I already had too much on my plate, we’re a busy family, and if we had a dog I would nag them incessantly about taking better care of it (“because we’re lazy, Mama”) and wind up doing too much myself, making me even more snappish and grumpy. The overall stress level in the house, already too high, would creep higher still. It would be disastrous.

Well, that’s possible. I don’t even care! I wanted a dog! A panting sniffing smiling muddy-pawed exasperating adorable mutt. Animals make me happy; they always have. I forgive them for pooping. Picking it up seems a reasonable price to pay for their shaggy sweet company.

Maybe widowhood is lonely. And losing a parent is hard. And facing your fears is empowering. And tapping extra love that we all have on reserve can be healing. It’s a lot of pressure to put on Ramona’s furry shoulders but I think she can handle it. This strange time, along with its terribleness, has offered me a number of unexpected gifts: time for noticing, gratitude for the natural world, freedom from our car and too-busy schedule that driving said car facilitates, long walks, fresh attunement to my grief, dance classes in the kitchen, appreciation for my community. Now Ramona joins the list. A doggy dog who will invite more love, more freak outs, more delight, more frustration, more nagging, more playing, more life into our tender family. I say yes to that.
 

notes on a quarantine, week seven

Every couple of days, since this all began, I’ve had the occasion to think a very strange thought: thank goodness Mike isn’t here. My heart grips and clings to itself with residual fear at the very idea. I mean sick Mike, of course, which is the Mike I usually think of first. Immunocompromised chemotherapy Mike, stem cell transplant patient Mike. We already lived through a reality in which other people with their unwashed hands and innocent coughs scared us. We didn’t let them in the house. We wore masks and gloves and stockpiled hand sanitizer. There’s still one from that era rolling around inside the minivan. It was very terrible.

So whenever I consider layering the realities of a global pandemic onto that state of baseline cancer vigilance I feel utter dread. Then relief: we don’t have to live that story. Then shock, and heartbreak: other people do. They are waiting for their counts to come back up, sequestered on stem cell transplant patient units, worried about what going home to this will be like.

But yesterday, something changed. I went on a muddy, rainy walk with Frances in our County Park (because you have to go on a walk, no matter what the weather says) and on the way home we stopped at the cemetery. I’d been wanting to visit since Easter. We walked up the grassy hill to Mike’s headstone and stood watching the rain fall around us and patter in the smooth gray bowl of its birdbath. We talked about why it was important that his body was there, and that we could visit that quiet place.

Mike, Mike. We’re here.

Lately I have been terrified afresh that I will forget him. I will forget the good things. I will lose the comforts of his smell, cadence, feel, rhythm - and when I do I will be lost, untethered to my first twenty years of adulthood, the roots of my family, the tree I am trying to nurture back into some kind of stability and bloom. This thought is much worse than the idea of caring for him in quarantine. It shakes me. I am afraid it is not a fear but an already-underway reality. I am afraid I have done a bad job of holding him here with us, and without him we will scatter to the winds.

At the cemetery I feel less afraid.

Being there was the first time I could imagine healthy Mike with us right now. I smiled, thinking of him zooming a seminar from the dining room and bitching about the impossibility of it, getting obsessive about the garden, carefully picking movies for us to watch together as a family. I thought of how he would sit with Beatrice and gently nurture her innate curiosity about numbers and words, excellent teacher that he was, or talk through Gabriel’s research project with him, or edit an essay with Frances. He would do all the things that I am not, because I’m working all day.

If you asked, these days Beatrice would tell you she hates school. I know it’s because seven year olds are not meant to learn remotely, in solitude, but it breaks my heart all the same. When I have a cancellation I run upstairs and typically find her curled up somewhere with her face four inches away from a screen. I say hooray, I have some time! Let’s look at your math. And I want her to light up with the love of learning and gratitude for her mama's unexpected special attention, to shift gears immediately in happy celebration of our stolen hour of shared home school. Instead, eyes fixed to the screen, she says no thanks. I say what do you mean no thanks?? And she says I don’t want to. Mama, I already did Happy Numbers this morning.

She is totally, completely over it.

So I cajole, and drag, and get a bit testy, and then short-tempered, and we eventually grit our teeth through ten minutes of something or other, and as soon as my next session starts she drifts back upstairs to her new best friend, iPad. And really, why shouldn’t she? It’s way more comfortable than sitting alone, trying to slog through a worksheet, and listening to me lavish attention on someone else on the other side of the door.

If Mike were here it would be so much better. Before the cemetery yesterday, it was less painful for my mind to tell me thank goodness Mike isn’t here and we don’t have to go through that too rather than hold the truth, which is that Mike was a great dad, a great teacher, a great introvert, and basically a great all around candidate for successful family sheltering-in-place. We used to joke (sort of, ha ha) that he should have been a monk. I can imagine him boasting about how well-suited to this life of confinement he would be. (I can also imagine him obsessing over the news, pacing around the house, driving me a bit batty - which wouldn't detract from the suitedness.) The things that freak me out right now - too much screen time, a growing negative association with school, loneliness, losing academic skills, the weight of depression and inertia threatening on the periphery, the sheer effort involved in making sure everyone gets outside, gets exercised, gets one-on-one time with me, connects with friends, and helps take care of our home - these things would be transformed from existential threats into mere challenges if Mike were here to share the responsibility of them all with me. It is so hard alone.

Because being in the cool wet thereness of the cemetery allowed more space for what I really feel, which is that in this pandemic I want Mike here more than ever, I am less afraid of losing Mike. The truth hurts; the truth consoles.

good friday

I woke up this morning with a strange, empty feeling. I watched the tiny cracks of light through the closed blinds move with the wind and clouds outside, listened to my quiet house, my quiet street, rolled onto my back and rested my hands on my hip bones, unwilling to make any move at all that would result in leaving the safety and stillness of my bed. Good Friday. All was dim, all was hushed. 

I eventually did. I leaned over and wheelbarrowed my hands and upper body to reach my phone that was charging nearby on the rug, hauled myself back into bed, and started reading emails and the terrible news, as is my wont, until it felt all wrong and I finally got up with vague thoughts about shaking off this darkness with various productive things that I should be doing before the children woke up and I had to begin my work day.

I went down the stairs and to the kitchen door, as I do every morning, behind which the cats were huddled and pressed, eagerly awaiting my approach. When I opened the door they fell forward out of it, as they do every morning, immediately meowing, looking up at me with wide desperate eyes, rubbing against my ankles and generally communicating their intolerably acute hunger for breakfast. I fed them. I drank a glass of water and made coffee. I watched the sky outside the tiny window. I could not commit to any of my productivity agenda items.

So I sat down at the kitchen table with my phone and opened Spotify and played John Prine. I had been avoiding that, I think, ever since I read he was in the ICU. Am I a huge fan? Not really. But so many of his songs were part of the tender soundtrack of many summers at my very special UU camp in Western North Carolina, a deeply formative place for me. I never learned the verses; I could only sing along to the choruses, but I always did so with a lot of heart. 

And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River, where paradise lay

It took about four seconds of hearing that song before the tears came. They came and came, with an intensity I haven't felt for awhile, the kind of grief wave that one can only submit to and ride until it has crashed on some other shore from the one you started out standing on. I rested my head and arms on the smooth wood of the kitchen table, clean because Gabriel wiped it down last night after dinner, aglow in the morning sun, and I cried. The tears weren't just for John Prine and his evocative story-songs, they were for my children who miss their friends, for my clients who are mourning and can't give and receive hugs of comfort, for doctors and nurses, for people who are alone, for my childhood, for cities living in fear, for all the parts of me I have sometimes wanted to push aside, for the smell and feel of a rhododendron forest in North Carolina. I cried for all the losses, every one of which is a feathery part of a vast root system whose taproot is my own deepest grief. Mike. Dad. Come back. Come back and hear this beautiful song.

Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking

Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

notes on a quarantine, week three

Now: Gabriel is playing guitar upstairs, the many voices of Beatrice’s classmates are echoing in the kitchen during a school meeting, Frances’s thoughts are quietly whirring in the living room with Little Women on her lap (we trade it back and forth, she rereading it and Beatrice and I reading it aloud, usually on the front porch after I’ve finished work for the day, wrapped in a blanket as the sun sets where Walnut St ends in a T at Race Avenue, down the hill from our house), and I am responding to student emails and planning out the remote therapy session schedule for the rest of the week. My thoughts bounce around: when will we be able to take a walk today, how to plan Beatrice’s activities during my next two sessions this afternoon, how to keep Gabriel from the cave of his room for extended periods, can we finish a birthday card for a friend before the salt-and-pepper weathered handsome mail carrier arrives, will the coffee will be kind and stretch itself magically and not run out before I am ready to again address grocery-acquisition, how can we resume our fun outdoor workouts with our neighborhood friends in a safe way (as the track at the college has become overcrowded, impossible to properly distance oneself now). I imagine the contents of my mind are a lot like yours. How will we secure our simple pleasures, how will we make it through the small challenges of today?

This week has, so far, been much better than last, when the stress of remote school and work starting in earnest had me at my wit’s end, or to be more specific crying my eyes out at least once a day in a fit of overwhelm. I am not a doctor, nor a delivery person, an epidemiologist, a grocery store worker, a nurse, a sanitation worker - I am none of these present-moment heroes, and I have had to sacrifice very little. But this is hard. It’s really hard. I think it’s okay to recognize that others’ burdens are immense, and still name and share our own feelings: sadness, isolation, frustration. As my dad would often remind me, there’s no comparing pain. We all have some, that’s all there is to know; so be compassionate when you can, to yourself and everyone else, too.

I’ve been thinking about him a lot, and dreaming often of Mike. Weird, vaguely upsetting dreams mostly. I have a lot of latent cancer-and-immediate grief-era fears that have been stirred up by the threat of this virus living everywhere. (That’s maybe a thing anyone who has gone through trauma or loss recently can understand.) But the normal emotional difficulties of being a parent, a therapist, a friend, a widow, a human sometimes feel extra difficult right now. So many normal life avenues like seeing a friend unexpectedly, making eye contact (video chatting, incidentally, does not provide proper eye contact!), hugging, stepping easily onto a neighbor’s porch, meeting for coffee, resting a heavy head on a welcoming shoulder, these usual gestures of connection and care that allow regular old moments of fear, sadness, and conflict to move through a person peacefully - that help us digest the shifting challenges of a Tuesday afternoon - these mundane moments of microhealing are no longer there for us. It’s just me, my feelings, my kids, and my kitchen. We have to hold it all somehow, and then find new ways to let it go.

Some things that have helped this week: lowered expectations, particularly of my ability to oversee school activities while working and my kids’ abilities to stay focused and productive while I am unavailable, small domestic routines I’ve been working on establishing like lunchtime walk/jogs with Beatrice on her scooter and daily chores and kids’ dinner-making nights, the purchase of a new iPad to bring our person-to-screen ratio to a far more functional 1:1, digging into domestic pleasures like gardening and baking, long walks without the kids, and too-long hot showers (also without the kids) (okay, actually sometimes Beatrice slides in, which I begrudgingly allow because someone has to make sure the shampoo gets properly rinsed out). Oh, and taking advantage of every shred of sunshine that we can.

But nothing makes up for the loss of tight-squeeze bear hugs, which I now realize I typically enjoy multiple times a day, because I am very lucky and surrounded by people I adore in my usual home-work-school life. My kids are all excellent huggers, but my widows out there especially know one’s children cannot take the place of an affectionate adult.

Beatrice has been attending Sunday School via Zoom over the past two weeks, and during the story of Jesus’s life, told with striking illustrated cards in muted colors, the teacher lingered over an image of Jesus’s thumbs gently pushing on the eyes of a blind man. When Jesus touched people, he changed them, she said. They were never the same again.

I miss touching, and being touched. I miss the change wrought in me with every hand squeeze and arm graze and knee knock.

I miss you.

two

Before Mike died, church was our Sunday morning default. My kids were acolytes and children's choir participants and long ago, when Frances was a baby, Mike and I were youth group leaders. After he died nothing was the same, and nothing was less the same than my children's attitudes towards church and God. I won't speak for them, but suffice it to say, I don't believe forcing children to do something they feel strongly opposed to is a great way to foster warm, safe feelings about said thing. I find myself the lone member of my family who still feels at home in a pew. As I am never alone, going to church by myself is nice. But I miss the kids snuggled next to me. And worry I am handling this all wrong for them. And that Mike's worst fears are all coming true. Thus every Sunday morning, because I am unsettled about this, I am pulled in a number of directions, uncertain which is most right.

Sometimes I go to church on Saturday evening and take the kids out to breakfast on Sunday. Sometimes I drag a complaining Beatrice with me to church. Sometimes I go to yoga class with friends and on my way out the door say next week, please, will you guys join me at church, knowing they will not. Sometimes I let everyone sleep in and I read the paper in the quiet and nothing really happens at all - I just think about various scenarios happening and then in the end make pancakes and sit around and drink coffee and talk with my kids instead.

May I point out that all of these Sunday mornings seem pretty decent to me, each meeting some very real needs? And the religious education problem is uncomfortable, and definitely counts as a problem, but it's not as tormenting as it once was. I'm trying to take the long view. And I'm trying to forgive myself for not knowing what to do about it, for needing and sometimes taking time for myself, for not having the energy to put much time or thought into it - besides the last minute handwringing on Sunday, twenty minutes before the service begins.

What I want for myself is to feel the receptive space within me, to know it is still there and hasn't been elbowed out by parent-teacher conferences and social media and remembering not to forget snacks for rehearsal and messing up my schedule at work and worries about people I care about traveling during a global pandemic. Church and yoga are both good for that.

So today it was yoga. And as I may have mentioned here before, about 90% of the savasanas I have practiced since I lost my husband end in tears. Like, it doesn't matter what was just on my mind or how good or bad I felt during class, the moment I settle in, flat on my back and exposed to all the universe, something shifts, my chest and throat tighten, and all I can do is try not to distract the yogis around me with audible sobs.

On a recent Sunday morning the teacher gently suggested we slowly scan our bodies for points of tension in order to release more fully into the pose. Instead my mind began to slowly scan Mike's body, starting with his marvelous stubby hairy toes and moving up to his skinny calves, eventually lingering on his clavicle, his shoulders, his cheekbones, his eyes. I cried and cried, for the preciousness of him.

Today, as I let my heavy legs relax and roll outwards and tucked my poky shoulder blades under my back, I remember thinking that I totally wasn't going to cry this time. Not happening, no way. I felt a bit detached, pleasantly tired, far from any kind of intense emotion. Neutral.

But then my mind began to wander back into the church dilemma, to my heathen children bickering at home and my dead husband sighing in disappointment, and in the midst of all that discomfort I was suddenly struck by a dreamy yet vivid vision - the kind that only happens in savasana - and it was Jesus. He was kneeling just behind and to the left side of me, gently stroking my forehead.

The aching, grieving part of me rose to the surface to feel his cool, smooth fingers soothe the tension from my head. The self-doubting and ashamed part of me felt Him reach over my shoulder and put a hand on my heart, and in my mind I covered it with my own hand, trying not to clutch, and cried, awash in that tenderness and compassion, and in my own tears, and in gratitude for something new growing in me.

I don't care if God sent me that vision, or I conjured it out of a need for some forgiveness, or to reassure myself that it's okay, really, I can be receptive to God wherever and however I am, because maybe those things aren't really in conflict with one another. Maybe they are all versions of the same thing.

It will be two years this Thursday. I've been more exposed, more pierced by the brute facts of what we went through over the past weeks. But I have also had occasion to confront some of the challenges we faced in our marriage in a more open, wholehearted way, a way I wasn't able to a year ago, or even four months ago, because it threatened my sense of safety in the world. I couldn't bear to consider and embrace it all, including our struggles and the responsibility I had in those, because I feared it would invalidate our lives together, the person I was and the person I am. If I fully admitted to our problems, would it mean I loved him less, loved him wrong?

But now I'm not afraid. I feel a peacefulness that I don't quite understand about all the parts of who we were together, maybe even most especially the extremely imperfect ones, and I find myself telling the truth about those to dear friends who patiently listen, helping me to discover things about my own extremely imperfect self that I am only now learning because I was too afraid to confront them when Mike was alive, or at the very least before he got sick.

And so my moment with Jesus's healing hands today felt like a vivid expression of a kind of grace I have been noticing and definitely not taking for granted lately. You can't really forgive someone, including yourself, if you don't bring the truth of what they did or didn't do into the light. And so I feel as if I've been looking at Mike, and myself, in the morning sunlight. What is revealed isn't always pretty, but I still love us very much. I also forgive us. I forgive Mike, I forgive me. And that gesture, of pulling darker things into the light, and blessing them all the same, has brought me a new peace that I am holding with the awe and lightness of touch that I would a baby bird. It is delicate, beautiful, mysterious, very likely about to fly off somewhere else, but I will know it was here always.

We've nearly made it two years. I never could have envisioned what this moment would be like, the toddlerhood of my grief. I'm definitely sturdier on my legs; walking is no big deal now. I can even run sometimes, though I do fall often and sometimes barrel into things which I immediately regret. I'm quick to cry, rather self-involved, and always seem to need help. I talk a lot. I can't have everything I want, and I want so much, and that's hard. I respond with my whole broken being to reassurance, an open blue sky, music, a flock of snow geese, a soothing hand on my brow. Acts of love. Sunshine. A beloved face. The arrival of spring.

When the older children were little, Mike and I used to comment knowingly to other parents that three is the new two. Like, it's the terrible threes, not the terrible twos! A parent really should enjoy two while she can. But my own infant widowhood, always terrible, is also becoming, so strange and unsettling as I enter this third year, increasingly spacious, surprising, peaceful. I did not expect my persistent pain to gradually and gently invite a more fuller, more accepted, more messed-up me to emerge. Yet here I am.

anything might happen

Long before personal pronouns were a thing, Mike and I spent hours talking about a philosopher named Luce Irigaray and the gendered nature of language, the limits it puts upon our ability to express the fullness of our realities to one another. Masculine ways of knowing were built right into grammar: the subject of a sentence wants an object, not another subject. How to speak to one another without violence, without reducing one gender to a lesser status, if the structures and forms of our sentences tacitly lead us to do just that?

Actually, I don’t know if I’m remembering any of this right. I do remember a sense of overwhelm, confronting the depths of masculine privilege that plumbed right down to the ways I speak and think. My impression of it all is hazy mostly because her work is difficult and Mike, who was extraordinary at translating complex theory into comprehensible language, could only speculate as to what the heck she was trying to say. He wanted my help figuring it out.

Before Mike, time fit into years in school – this or that happened when I had Mrs. Craig in the fourth grade, or during my junior year of college. After Mike, and before the children, I can identify memories by sorting them into a series of inscrutable continental philosophers. As in: we would run in Prospect Park on Sunday afternoons the fall when Mike was reading Gadamer. We moved into that fantastic apartment during the summer of Merleau-Ponty. Levinas came and went and came again; one of his more memorable returns was while I was in the shower one morning and Mike burst in, excitedly explaining a new approach to his dissertation in which he would differentiate the early work, in which we humans are fugitives, from his later work, in which we are hostages. From and to The Other, I suppose. I had just started a new job then.

I never read any of it, but I might as well have. I was a naïve philosophy midwife, asking questions and trying to grasp some part Mike's inner world and thus helping him clarify his own thought. Sometimes I felt like a frustrating (and frustrated) piece of furniture as he talked and talked and I simply didn’t get it. Yep, there were some serious subject-object moments. Sometimes we transcended the specifics and had thrilling dialogues about things like whether or not men and women can truly communicate intersubjectively, despite the limits of grammar. Those talks about Irigaray fell into the latter category. 

But I’d never thought about the masculine structure and logic of stories as limiting what we are able to imagine, see, and know until I read Brit Marling in the Sunday Times over the weekend. She is outrageously smart and cool and, incidentally, I think she should be my friend. But anyway. I loved her piece on rejecting the premise of the ‘strong female lead’ because it’s really just a strong male lead who looks hot naked – meaning she typically embodies masculine virtues of domination, power, linear ambition. These are not values that guide my own life, yet as I thought more about it I began to see that I have often judged myself against them, and when I do I am always lacking. 

(Including during some of those long philosophy talks with Mike. If I had an intuitive objection to an idea Mike was testing out, I could never out-argue him to prove my point. I couldn’t prove any point. I talk in circles, I seek collaboration in my thinking, I look for narrative. I would always drag his pure abstraction down to the ground, testing out ideas in the real world, which was complex and multilinear and troubled just about any bold claim about the way morality, or existence, or human subjectivity works. This could drive Mike absolutely nuts.)

Marling is honest about confronting the limits of all our imaginations – colonized as they are by stories by and about men since forever – in envisioning a female protagonist that does not respond to male desires so much as acts and speaks for herself, from her own desires. A female hero. What even is that?

The story we all know of the hero’s journey, from epic poems and books and movies and songs and fairy tales, is structured, she explains, as follows: inciting incident – rising tension – explosive climx – denouement. Which sounds a lot like a male orgasm. 

But really, why wouldn’t our stories reflect our sexuality, which reflects the totality of our gendered, embodied experience in a world that seems to want to polarize, exaggerate and ultimately distort masculinity and femininity? 

A male orgasm is an excellent, exciting thing. But it is only one way. The linear nature of it is what doesn’t map onto my own inclinations and ways of understanding. I can never be the hero of a story like that. 

A female orgasm is something else. Or rather a female erotic experience, because I don’t think the beginning-middle-end structure necessarily works for a female hero – the female sexual experience is often multilinear, diffuse, complex, shifting in intensities, inclusive of one’s whole being, driven not so much by a singular, directed urgency. One orgasm can just set the stage for another. Anything might happen.

That sounds more like the structure of a plot about someone like me. Anything might happen, and it often does. Denouement? What’s that? This story keeps spinning out in many directions, touching many levels of experience, intimacy and imagination. But I have no idea how one might tell that story.

I think of a friend I had in high school who was marvelously charismatic and funny and smart but also, over time, increasingly abusive and manipulative to the people around her. I struggled for many months with private thoughts of anger, hurt and confusion over how to protect myself in a situation that was decidedly bad and getting worse all the time. But she was part of a network of relationships that I knew I would risk losing if I separated from her. The social costs would be painful to bear. Eventually I made a series of quiet gestures that indicated I was pulling away. She objected, demanded I explain myself. I passively demurred, spent a lot of time with my boyfriend, and avoided her as much as possible, until it was finally clear we were no longer friends. I hated what I then saw as total, despicable cowardice on my part. Why couldn’t I have confronted her as some better version of myself might have in a movie? (A glamorized masculine narrative type movie!) Why didn’t I stand on a table and spit all my anger at her in the middle of the cafeteria for all to see? 

For years I considered this episode as illustrative of my interpersonal wimpiness, my inability to make a hard and fast break in a blaze of confrontational glory.

That is, until a few months ago, when I reunited with a few friends from high school. We hadn’t stayed in touch. I had been right about the social costs to separating from that friend, who came up in conversation that night. My closest friend from that time pulled me aside. I envied you, she said. You were the only one brave enough to get away. The rest of us got sucked down into the shit. 

Huh. That was a complete surprise. As we talked more, I saw through her eyes, and came to see that trying to preserve other relationships and ultimately choosing self care was, in its own way, brave. Braver than staying for the abuse. Heroic, even. I got out the only way I could: messily, quietly, and with many conflicted feelings. But I did get out. 

The only time I have exploded in violence and anger at another human (besides my children, God forgive me) (oh yeah and my parents and sister when I was growing up, forgive me those tantrums too please) was when I arrived home from the hospital in a terrified, free-falling state after a doctor suggested that the only sensible explanation for the inexplicable fevers Mike was suffering - after every possible alternative had been ruled out - was that his lymphoma was back. That relapse was a devastating moment unlike any other. I had parked down the street from our house as the space out front was blocked by a delivery truck. Another neighbor pulled in just after me, and as I ran up the walk I could hear him muttering loudly, clearly so that I would hear, about how rude some people were who parked in his spot right in front of his house. 

I stopped, breathless and shaking. I turned to him, glaring, and said excuse me? Are you talking to me right now?

You can imagine where things went. I was furious. I yelled that a city street was not anyone’s personal parking spot. I yelled that I was coming home for JUST A MINUTE to get a charger for my husband who is in the hospital with CANCER. Because he has cancer AGAIN.

I couldn’t speak afterwards. I shook on and off for hours. It was terrible, terrible. Treating another human like that (whom I learned later was attached to that parking spot because his wife is chronically ill and has difficulty walking any distance at all) was awful for me. Turns out the triumphant take down of the movies isn’t really my thing. Explosive climax, sure. That sounds great! As long as I’m up for the traumatized, anxiety-driven full-body shaking afterwards. 

So. If the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are stories undergirded by a particular, somewhat extreme version of masculine desire and sexual release, maybe we have to retell our stories, and retell them again. All of us, not just women. Widowhood has brought me a loneliness deeper than any I have ever known, but it would be only partly true to stop there – it has also brought me a new willingness to uncover my own tangled up ferocity, my own desires which do not line up with the male hero’s. To reach down and invite my imagination and intuition and curiosity and weird circular tangential embodied way of thinking to consider whether I have been more heroic than I ever knew, or even wanted to know. Being a social outlier has some unexpected silver linings. 

What does it mean to be the hero of your own story? I reframe and rewrite personal narratives with my clients all the time, because it’s powerful and gets us closer to the truth. And I think people are good simply because they are. I love that about us. Which suggests the ways of knowing and being that are gendered feminine, just as ways gendered masculine, are good simply because they are, too. So how to reimagine a story that takes into account your many ways: feminine, masculine, a mix of the two, something outside of that binary completely?

Some of my ways are

talking and thinking circuitously

valuing connetion, empathy, relationships

expressing creativity and curiosity

a keenly embodied, sensory-attuned way of understanding my response to the world

feeling a kinship with animals, especially other mammals

bringing my feelings into every part of my life as a way to live more deeply, including and most especially in my work as a therapist and mother

honoring and supporting other people

moving

listening to stories

telling the truth

embracing expansiveness and inclusion

fearing conflicts

longing to see and touch the natural world

crying easily and often

Now. What are your many good ways of approaching this broken tender world, and living out your story within it?