heaven goggles

The past few weeks have been full to the brim. There was picking up Gabriel at Harper's Ferry and bringing him and his friends home for a big Easter celebration, followed the next day by his 18th birthday party, and the next weekend by my mother's 75th birthday party. I've been growing my private practice, supporting my students at work, waking up early to exercise, mothering my children, planning the summer, and feeling lots of feelings without much space to feel them in.

But then last Thursday evening I picked up Gabriel and his friend Emerson for one more day off the trail while they were in Pennsylvania. Early Saturday I made them dozens of pancakes, then drove them back to Hawk Mountain for a final goodbye until the trail's end in Maine. Parting on the side of the road, surrounded by new spring green leaves and crisp dappled sunshine, hugging my enormous child, my heart's elastic stretched farther than seemed reasonable. 

He was happy and healthy, capable and cheerful. Adventuring forth, he embodied everything a mother could want for her child, and yet it was all I could do to hold back my tears. He knew it, and hesitated.

Go, go! I'm fine, I'm okay. Have a great day on the trail!

The tears pressed against my eyes said don't go, the tears said go, the tears said I am so proud and happy, the tears said we will flow and flow, and touch all the rivers you cross ahead.

I held them back until I couldn't see the boys anymore and got back into the car. 

After my cry, I drove home through green hills and farmland, listening to the Plum Village podcast The Way Out is In. The tears came right back, in a different gentle spirit, as a monk told loving stories of Thich Nhat Hanh in the days after his stroke at age 89 that illustrated his acceptance of death, deep understanding of interbeing, and delight in the sangha, communicated clearly in his smile when he could no longer speak. He recounted how Thich Nhat Hanh used to tell his Christian friends the kingdom of heaven is right here. All you need is to listen to the birds singing, feel the sunlight on your skin, look into the beloved faces of your family and friends. It is happening, right now, all around you. 

Something about the pain and tenderness of goodbyes can make a space for the stealth kingdom of heaven - normally so hidden by the noise of everyday life - to become more detectable, palpable, illuminated. I listened to the podcast, and I saw it shining through the pollen-dusted windshield of my car.

There have been irritable, rushed, angry, snapped at by strangers, frustrated by insurance, and burdened by my laptop's dying battery type moments since that morning, and in them I have sometimes remembered to try it out. I say to myself: Meagan, the kingdom of heaven is right here. 

Right. In all this disaster, right here. Sometimes, when I'm hanging on by my fingernails, the sentiment just makes me laugh. But most of the time, intentionally putting those heaven goggles on works. 

This new tiny practice has cracked me wider open to the poignancy of a thousand pink petals scattering the sidewalk in a glorious mess, pale new leaves above bereft of their delicate finery, already preparing for the deeper greens of summer. To the choppy waves of emotions with Beatrice on a drive to Philadelphia that eventually - magically - led to us belting along to pop songs with all the windows down, Ramona the dog in the backseat closing her eyes in the bliss of spring air streaming around the planes of her upturned snout. To my boyfriend's face in quiet profile, and a poem tacked on my office wall I haven't read in months but is just as beautiful as ever.  

To the tenderness and porosity of being with my clients in their vast felt experience.

One of them, who has a long history of depression, told me that she knows something has changed inside. She is learning how precious she is, and it is revelatory. I filled up with joy, and so did she, laughing out loud together. We spent the rest of our session exploring what about therapy and her life and her relationships and her work has supported this new brilliant knowing. What set this change in motion? At the end of it all, she paused, then smiled at me, and said, 

...it could just be the weather?

More laughter. Definitely could be, I said.

It sure is easier to know the kingdom of heaven in pink-and-green April than it is in brown-and-gray March. All the same. I'll take it. 

the march of water & the waters of march

When we were young and unmarried and childless, Mike once gently said something to the effect of: Meagan, sometimes you twist a knife in the wound of your dad's loss. It's like you want it to hurt worse. Maybe it doesn't have to hurt so much.

I mean, okay. Yes. I likely was twisting an enormous dull knife in my own oozing grief-wound then. But I wanted it to hurt, because in the hurting I felt connected to my dad. I was afraid of living without stabs of pain. I was afraid of becoming an adult without his help. I missed him so much. 

It will be thirty years without him on March 22nd, and eight years without Mike tomorrow. 

I started watching The Pitt last night. (An aside: whoa). Anyway, after seeing lots of up close and personal stab wounds and incisions, I am happy to say with utter confidence that I no longer push or twist any knives in my heart. 

Eventually I learned that I don't have to poke at and reopen something from my past in order to connect with it, because losing a beloved person isn't a singular event. It's a river that courses through my temporal physical spiritual body, where it has become integrated into the landscape. It's a stream of tenderness that moves through me and never stops. Clear water that can be shockingly cold, quietly burbling, hard to wade through, or relieving on a hot day.

I have lived my entire adult life with the cracked-open pain of grief. Who would I be otherwise? It's impossible to know, and who cares anyway? I like the person I am, easy tears and all. A throughline of loss connects me to the true nature of people, things, reality: all of it laden with love, complicated, never all one thing but containing so very many things, reminding me that time and touch and other people's eyes are mysteries impossible to fully pin down with words.

So yeah, no knife twisting required. If anything, my intention these days is to simply widen the channel. To try to welcome rather than get mad at the river when it unexpectedly overflows its banks. Like the ancient Nile (so many history podcasts in our family, forgive me) that flooded annually, leaving renewed fertile soil behind that supported an incredible civilization for thousands of years.  

(I really can't stop with this metaphor, I am caught in its relentless current, somebody sit on my fingers...! No? Okay, fjording ahead.)

My children and I keep moving farther away in time from the day Mike died. It definitely freaks me out. When I notice the vastly different developmental moment we are now in, it's scary and discouraging - we are being further separated from one another and I can't make it stop. But then the river swells with the sorrow of love, as it always does in March particularly, and connects me to the child and woman I used to be, and the woman I will become, and to the people I love with a fathomless depth that have shaped me to the core, and I am reassured. 

The panicky objections subside. There's nothing to fight or grasp at. I just have to allow this sun-and-shade dappled river to flow freely, and trust it won't break me. 

I stopped at Mike's tree on the walk to work today. The sun was shining. There are tiny buds on its spindly branches! I rested my hands on the solid warm trunk, and felt my heart stretch - with missing Mike, and with gratitude for a more peaceful grief. 

May all our nurturing tender rivers flow and flow, connecting us to one another, living and dead, and the vast ocean beyond.

snow launch

I am sitting at gate T10 in the Atlanta airport, and my flight is delayed. I just traversed the very same hallway where this past July I said goodbye to Gabriel (who was then heading off for thirty days of backpacking in Wyoming) and promptly broke down in tears, only to be comforted by an angelic airport worker who held me in her strong arms and pretend-scolded there's no crying in my airport! 

I told you about it then. That goodbye was a dry run for this goodbye. Yesterday morning Gabriel set out walking through the snow in the direction of the Appalachian Trail with two intrepid friends. They, and their families, stayed with us in a cozy rental house near Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the trail, for a send-off weekend. When a big snowfall made it impossible for us parents to drive the hikers to the trailhead, they decided to walk the fifteen miles there instead. 

He was so ready. Unplowed country roads and single digit temps were not about to stop him. 

Gabriel devised this plan in July 2024. Back then, when I met him at camp in North Carolina, I was coming from an unprecedented ten days of travel with either my boyfriend, my friends, or myself in the Smoky Mountains. He'd had six weeks of his own mountain living by that point, and it gave rise to a plan: to graduate high school a year early and hike the AT during a gap year before college. He sat me down in the dining hall with expectant, big eyes to tell me all about it. 

Okay, I said.

Of course I had questions: who would he go with? How would he learn the needed skills? What about his plans for senior year? And then there were the waves of heart-dropping realization: he would be leaving us sooner than anticipated. The profound sadness of losing our buoyant, funny, big-hearted boy.  

But I had no real doubts. The healing effects of hikes and porch sitting and open time with people who are dear to me were threading through my body like warm light as we had that first talk about the AT. I wanted the same peace and connection to the natural world for him, times a million.

He did it all over the next 19 months: changed his classes and graduated a year early, researched the trail, learned wilderness skills, applied to college, took his friends on lots of camping trips and long walks, worked at small farms to save money, bought lots of fancy ultralight backpacking stuff. Tolerated the loneliness of choosing a path unlike any of his peers and the attendant bouts of feeling adrift and uncertain. Accidentally had a merino buff sent to Frances at Princeton. Forgot his gaiters at home. Shopped with me in a Publix outside Atlanta after we landed this past Friday for things like tuna in foil packets, instant rice, dried fruit. 

As when Frances left for college, I felt a strange calm in the lead up to his launch. I wasn't worried. I just kept doing the next thing we needed to do. But about two weeks ago, on a super cold evening walk, I turned to Gabriel and said: Wait. How will you warm up when you aren't walking or in your sleeping bag? Won't you have to sit still in the snow sometimes? 

He patiently explained to me how they would navigate cold and snowy weather. I asked some follow ups. My anxiety was starting to bubble. He took a deep breath, stopped walking, and turned to look at me, placing his hands firmly on my shoulders. 

Sometimes, Mama, I'll be uncomfortable. And that's okay. 

We hugged. Right, yes. He was signing up for uncomfortable. He was signing up for everything the earth has to offer: the cold, the warm, humidity, rain and sun, insects and roots and boulders and bears. The inviting rhododendron fairy thickets of Western North Carolina. That was the point. He wanted a glorious uncomfortable trek, all his own.

Sometimes when I'm with other families, especially those I perceive as having their shit together with two living parents at the helm, I feel self-conscious about my widowed status and varied shortcomings. I feel alone. I get defensive and think things like: well, I'd make those kinds of dinners and be able to show up to all the events and volunteer at school and arrange for lots of enriching activities if I had 100% more parenting power in this family too! I would plan and research more, set better screen limits, have some rules and actually enforce them if I had a whole extra adult who happened to love these children as much as I do helping out around here. You know, someone like their dad. 

It's a weird, dangerous thought-pathway to follow. I don't recommend it. 

So I was a little afraid I'd be gripped by the familiar involuntary combo of self-pity, defensiveness and fear of having screwed over my kids when we arrived at the rental house on Friday evening. The other parents, whom I'd never met, led the weekend planning efforts and seemed to know a lot more about the trail and what the boys were facing. I was sharing the house with two dads, two moms, a grandma, two sisters and a brother. Our numbers were weak in comparison; it was just me and Gabriel. Beatrice wanted to avoid this extended goodbye and stay home, and Frances was at school. 

But my bad widow-mom fears never made so much as a peep. We parents whispered our worries around the kitchen island while the kids played pool in the basement and rolled in the snow outside. We turned to each other for help in discerning where the new boundaries should be, for support with the many unknowns ahead.

Laurie and Julie and I curled on couches, watching the blustering snow, gripping our cooling mugs of coffee in maternal solidarity. We all knew things would never be the same again, so we cried and laughed and told a lot of stories. Saturday was spent admiring snow, taking walks, pondering maps, comparing gear, and generally managing the uncertainty of our children starting a thru hike in the midst of an emergency winter weather event.

Gabriel and I took a long walk in the snow and talked about everything. All of it. That really helped. When we got back to the house I told him I wished we could keep walking because it was so beautiful out. He said, I love how being in nature makes you happy, Mama. 

Sunday morning he and I sat on the rug and waited while the ten other people slowly got themselves ready to walk to the end of the long drive for the big sendoff. I showed him how I was wearing my necklace made of Papa's wedding ring for the occasion. I couldn't suppress my tears. I leaned on his strong meaty shoulder and thought about how he was once a seven pound person who slid out of my body with surprising peacefulness. We finally headed out, toggling between making ourselves laugh crazily with imagined absurdist trail names and allowing my tears to do what they needed to do the whole slippy way to the road. 

Then we took some pictures, and then we said goodbye.

I walked alone in the snowy woods after that so I could cry and miss Mike and ask God to please watch over my capable boy. When my toes went numb and I was all cried out, I went back to the quiet house, where everyone else was taking care of themselves in their own ways. 

I had to delay my flight because the roads were impassable. We all arranged to stay an extra day. This morning as we packed up the house it hit me all at once: unlike dropping Frances off at college, and contrary to my expectations, I wasn't alone in this launch. 

Because ever since Mike died, I've felt my aloneness as a parent keenly at every big transition with my children. Especially when surrounded by other proud moms and dads exchanging looks and squeezing each others' hands. But this time, I felt the solid tether of love between me and my boy and the support of the other parent-friends who were in it with me. I was so grateful. I was amazed. It was a widowed mama first. 

And then, after a wild, lengthy hunt for jumper cables with my new friend Dillon, I left via the long driveway myself. The scratch marks of bare trees on mountain ridges against the bright sky, rusted pick up trucks by the side of the road, melting patches of snow everywhere, blue backs of gentle mountains in the distance, a downloaded Spotify mix Gabriel's friend Leo made me two summers ago that I listened to when I was driving without a signal through these same mountains - all of this accompanied me on my way to the airport today, rooting me in this moment and in all the moments that came before and led up to it, all the way back to arriving at camp in Western North Carolina when I was nine years old and breathing in the green wet air and knowing I was home. 

The woods are becoming Gabriel's home now, and his friends are becoming part of his family. 

I miss him so much already, yet I wouldn't bring him home to fill the house with reading sprawled on the couch, listening to Jurassic 5 and John Prine in the kitchen, and playing games with his friends at the dining room table for all the money in the world. Mother love is mind-boggling. It may be washed with tears and edged with uncertainty, but his bright flourishing is a joy, all the way down.