Lately my inner and outer life have been encountering one another with a particular curiosity and fizz, which every so often results in an alchemical story-busting magic. Like an onion that you had no idea held layers beneath its taut brown skin peeled back and then peeled back again. I have held old stories tight to my chest about what my life and I am supposed to be like - tight as the layers of an onion pressed against one another. I have held them so close I didn't know they were there.
When circumstances conspire to allow me to hold an old story out away from my body so I can see it properly and recognize the thin places where it isn't really true, I feel exhilarated. And scared and sad. Stories about what I am supposed to perform for others, how I am supposed to look, what I can control, what I should accomplish and desire, what I should be able to contain and manage when it surges inside me.
I found myself unexpectedly crying the other day in the middle of telling someone how amazing it is that we can keep growing and becoming more truly ourselves as time passes, despite our culture's suggestion that aging is a one-way trip to something smaller, lesser than what we once were. I am thrilled that I get to set down old stories that are no longer and maybe never were true and consider new ones that reveal something closer to what really is.
The tears were for Mike, who never got to experience this distinct stage of life, one defined less by striving and articulating one's path and more by consolidation of and learning from all those grasping years before.
I was forty when Mike died. I felt crushed by the almost immediate awareness that an essential part of me died with him. I mourned for my children who lost both their father and the mother they used to have, someone happily partnered and far more resilient and cheerful and competent than the raw grieving wreck I knew myself to be.
They really did lose the old me. She is never coming back. The strange thing is that now, nearly four years later, I don't want her to.
I like my forties. I like how I make decisions and communicate and reflect on what I want. I like swearing freely and learning to ask for help and my fledgling efforts at growing spiritually. Even more surprising, I like the family we have become, the relationships we push and pull and play inside of as everyone keeps growing in his or her unique, relentless, stunning fashion.
But so much of who we have become finds its roots in Mike's cancer and death. It freed us to be more honest, loving, angry, mindful of things other people often aren't. We like that. Which is, to say the least, confusing.
It is profoundly sad to feel your strengths, the things you like about yourself, inextricably tied to your deepest loss. I long for sturdier bridges to connect the before times to the abundant present. I would like my children to know that all of this links to all of that, even if our world hadn't ruptured in between.
Last night at bedtime I told Beatrice how proud her papa would be - is - of her.
Why?
It's just the way you are, Beatrice. The way you think and move and make jokes and sleep and snuggle. Just being who you are is being someone your papa is proud of and loves so much.
Oh.
And that brought forth a wave of anguish, a deep grief over her rapidly fading and lost memories. She feels left out. She wishes she had had more time. So we took out the book of photos I made for her birthday last year and told stories about all the images of Beatrice and Papa, all the moments captured that prove they were together and loved each other well.
She feels guilty for not feeling sadder. She always tells me this with her eyes filled with tears. She feels guilty for liking our family the way it is, and not knowing what it was like before Papa got sick and died. If he walked in the front door right now, would he be a stranger to her?
No he wouldn't, I said. It might take you a few minutes. But you would know Papa, and he would know you. That never changes.
We cried for a long time, for how awful it is that he never met Ramona the dog, or our funny cats, or lived in this house, or knew about Beatrice's third grade teacher - so much of what structures everyday life. It's terrifying to think the gulf between us widens as we all grow. In one way, I know it never really does. But still I feel frightened. I can't lose him over and over.
Many years ago, when our friend Edith asked Mike how he knew he was ready to marry me even though there was no way to know how I would change and he would change and what would happen for the rest of our lives, he said he felt confident that he would love whoever I became. However much changed, at the root of it, he had faith that I would still be me, a person he deeply loved.
That can be true in the other direction too, even though it didn't occur to me then. However much I change, my love is unaltered. Maybe that slippery abstract truth is one of the bridges I long for. Maybe it can support all of us as I keep learning new stories and tentatively stepping into the truth they offer.
Even so, I wish he'd met Ramona.
