my brilliant friends

This slippery season started late this summer, when I read Dave Eggers' latest novel, Contrapposto. It's the tender story of an unlikely artist's life. As you move from childhood through the years with him, his identity as an artist and one friendship in particular anchor and shape the person he becomes. 

The novel's epigraph is from Georgia O'Keefe: to see takes time, like to have a friend takes time.

The ending is beautiful, but I really started crying after I read the acknowledgments. I can't quote it exactly here, because I loaned the book to Beatrice and it's deep in her messy room somewhere. But he lovingly thanks the friends he has had for decades. 

Decades! Really? But Mr. Eggers, you and I are roughly the same age! Then I realized I too have had friends for decades. We're kind of old now. 

To have a friend takes time. Maybe it's not just that you can't become friends overnight. Maybe to have a friend takes months, years, decades - at least to know the full, vast treasure of friendship.

Since reading the novel, in the weeks leading up to Gabriel's college drop off, a lot happened on the friends-for-decades front. I ran into a friend from high school whom I rarely see at the grocery store. I was waiting in line, and felt a gentle hand on my back. I started. Who touches me with that kind of tenderness out here in the world?

Someone I knew when I was fourteen years old! I thought that was you, he said, smiling. How are you?

Nothing really seemed to matter beyond the fact that we knew each other as children and wished the best for one another. No weird comparisons, judgement, social debts to pay. Just - it sure is nice to see you.

I reconnected with a friend I first met at camp this summer, and met his darling new baby. Being together, a similar emotional softness and simplicity permeated the space around us: it's you! You are here, you're good, I love you. It happened again, over an email exchange in August, with another friend from college whom I haven't seen in many years. It's you! I love you! All the rough edges and doubts of being young have fallen away. What a deep down joy.

When I took Gabriel to school, I was saying goodbye to him, and to this chapter of our family life. And I was taking him to college without his papa, who would have been tickled and stirred down to his toes to drop his boy off at Swarthmore College. Sitting alone amongst all the other parents in the amphitheater, the acute wrongness of his absence hurt. But there's more! I seemed to also be awash in memories from my own first semester on that campus. Before Mike. The past kept tugging on my sleeves. 

I was seventeen. I met my best friend. I met my boyfriend. I struggled to pass bio and adored my religion and literature class. I started running and returned to dance. I ate purple blueberry bagels and lucky charms cereal out of clear plastic dining hall cups. I felt weird, alienated, deeply uncool, lacking in sophistication, inspired, excited, independent. My dad was diagnosed with lung cancer that November and I fell into a confusing darkness, never sure where I should be. Neither home nor school was right; my heart was in tatters. 

At drop off, Gabriel met another boy whose mother was in my class. After a few moments, we remembered each other with big smiles on our faces - as we were that first semester. Another friend with whom I am rarely in touch texted to tell me about discovering someone else from our class has a daughter at Swarthmore. 

The first memory that came up of that particular parent? Mike and I began our love affair when he was visiting campus during my senior year. We had been spending time together, tentatively, unsure what was happening, and walked in the Crum woods before my afternoon class and his train back to New York. We ended our walk at a stone wall where we lingered, and kissed. I said goodbye, my heart doing it's thing, about to beat right out of my chest, and ran into a classroom that was slowly filling up with familiar faces. I stood in the middle of the room, unsure what I could possibly do with myself in that moment. 

I just kissed Mike Brogan!! I breathlessly announced to any who would hear.

My eyes rested on this man who is now a fellow middle aged parent of a member of the class of 2030. He smiled back. Okay, he said. 

That was it. I sat down in a desk. But I remember. 

Tomorrow night I'm signed up to take a 'lifelong learning' class over zoom with the same professor, now retired, who taught that class. I've never done anything like it before, but it was an opportunity to reread some of my favorite novels with an amazing teacher; that compelled me to sign up earlier this summer. 

But what was I thinking? More of this time-tangle?! My body can barely contain all the times and places layered throughout my muscles, organs, and bones that light up at the slightest provocation. The girl I was, unformed, passionate, afraid, lovestruck. She visits often these days, and I am full of compassion for her and her extraordinary friends. Precious then, even moreso now. 

It's so hard and marvelous to be young; it's so hard and marvelous to have children who grow up beautifully, and remind you. 

And yet, to have our wise and hilarious friends with us in it all is an immeasurable comfort!

forest walk

I just talked to Gabriel for the first time since dropping him off at college on Tuesday. What had orientation been like?

Well, he said, in the first couple of days he tried to keep it all trees, no forest. 

He was referencing a conversation we had shortly before we said goodbye, sitting on a shady bench outside the dining commons. It was all so strange: to not go home together after our nice day at Swarthmore College, to have a slew of small talky conversations with strangers, some of whom may prove to be lifelong friends, to be bright and cheerful while teetering on the edge of an irrevocable change. To participate in icebreakers! Given the glorious sylvan setting, the tree-forest thing came readily. Maybe just stick to the trees. One thing at a time. Maybe, for now, don't dwell too much on the forest. 

So that's what he'd done. Lots of new people, new places, activities, a trip to Target, class registration. Aspen, birch, oak, oak, oak.

That's why I'd waited. I knew he had to be there all the way at first, and not feel the tug of home. But by yesterday afternoon I could barely stand it, and decided that it was okay to consider my own needs too so asked if we could talk. Sure, he responded. 

There have been a lot of trees in my life over the past four days. Today, for example, I walked to barre class, stopped for produce at the market, regretted the cantalope the entire walk home, made chocolate chip pancakes for me and Beatrice, facetimed Frances for assistance in procuring all the forgotten items she wanted me to mail to her at school, picked up my mom's dog and brought him here for the weekend while she is away, packed up and addressed a box of Frances items and a smaller one of Gabriel items, waited in a long line at the post office balancing said items and hoping the postal worker would look down at my packages and say "Gee, Princeton and Swarthmore! Are these addressed to your brilliant kids? You must be such a great mom - " (she did not), drove to the mall to return my old laptop to the Apple store, drove to Whole Foods to return Beatrice's too-small Adidas, drove downtown to pick up Beatrice and Willy at the new Nori Taco place, brought them home, pet the dogs, and sat down to write. 

Gabriel called while I was at the mall. I found a beige plastic couch outside a quiet department store. My entire nervous system reset.

After I'd heard all about everything, I told him I wasn't worried about him. He's got this. And I wasn't worried about Swarthmore. It's terrific! I just needed to hear his voice, all the same. 

Is it because I miss him? I mean sure, I do. But by now I'm used to him splitting for long stretches, and often in places where he isn't easy to reach. He's been at camp in the summers, spent a month in the wilds of Wyoming, hiked the Appalachian Trail, and backpacked in Oregon for two weeks earlier this month. But those were all adventures. This is the next chapter of his life.

When you love someone it is trees and forest. You have no choice. The forest is breathing, alive, everywhere. It holds a thousand histories. The story of my own beginnings at Swarthmore, of formative memories all over campus, sweeping romantic love and deep friendship, of the family I made with Mike, of Gabriel's surprisingly quick and peaceful birth, his sweet contemplative nature that shone so bright even as a baby alongside his love of motion and stories and music. Of everything we've been through over the past eighteen years. So much. Of long conversations and silliness and Gabriel making me laugh so hard I cry or pee or both. 

Every time the sunlight moves the temperature shift tells my body this will never be the same. 

And so I find I am in a forest of grief. The trees are all pretty nice. I love trees! But an insistent heavy part of me wants to stop all this busy back to school tree work and curl up in the dark coolness of the forest floor instead, where I will let the ragged weight of my grief anchor me in stillness among the moss and beetles and leaf litter. Just for awhile. 

Even the most ideal, happy change can really knock a person off her feet. 

laugh it off

And what did your father do then? 

My dad, embodying a very serious analyst character, would look at me over the tops of his glasses, head positioned at a thoughtful tilt.

Go on. Say more, Meagan. 

That was how he dealt with questionable parenting moments, microconflicts between us: imagining how I would describe them to my therapist decades hence. He played both parts, with gusto. 

Well, Dr. So and So, he meant well, but he was always tossing the cats off the counters when he got mad.

And ... how did this cat-tossing make you ... feel?

The dialogue always made me laugh, even when I was seven years old and not really clear on why the exchange was funny. I hadn't yet encountered Freud cartoons in the New Yorker or watched the Sopranos. But as with so much of my father's humor I went along for the ride. It was thrilling to be in on adult jokes, indecipherable ones included. 

The therapist routine wasn't just funny; it was an elegant emotional pivot that communicated: I recognize I did something that upset you. I'll be self-deprecating and reassuringly in charge of the narrative all at once. Let's acknowledge it without getting too mired in it. Let's have a laugh!

My dad is surely to blame when it comes to my predilection for silly voices and accents. And my tendency to use humor in tense moments. I just love a big cathartic laugh.

Once on the walk to school when Beatrice was in second grade, I tried to make her laugh a little too soon after talking about some hard feelings. She did laugh, then paused abruptly on the sidewalk and looked back at me with anger in her eyes. 

You always do this! You make me laugh when I'm upset! Mama, you really invalidate my feelings when you do that. 

Whoops.

As one of my clients said after I was interrupted in our session yesterday by my kids, whom I'd left unable to make it to band camp by accidentally taking the car key to my office, Wait - Meagan - are you a bad mother?

Sometimes!

Anyway, I've passed on the goofball humor coping strategy to them too. Gabriel is now eighteen years old, back from the Appalachian Trail, and confronting all the complications of adult life. He has to let the doctor know they're allowed to talk to me so I can help him upload health forms. He has to register to vote, and with the selective service system. And he has to give his new college permission to let me have access to his student account so that I can upload the documents financial aid wants from me and ensure the bill is paid correctly while he's at work.

Right now I can't see the status of your bill; only you can see that.

Gabriel, sweaty and tired after a day of mulching, stood over my little work station at the dining room table, looking a bit lost. My financial aid notes covered a section of the Sunday paper next to my laptop.

So... you just need to log in, then make me an authorized payer...

In an instant Gabriel's beleaguered mind returned to his body. He knew just how to handle this situation - a new schtick!

Um...hello, Swarthmore College? Do you know Mama? Just talk to Mama! 

Still in character: Mama is...Mama. You know Mama. She's Mama! 

We both laughed so hard. When you are 18, a part of you is four years old, and a part of you is 30. You are independent and responsible and ready for anything. You are so capable! But also, you are wanting Mama to just take care of it. 

Little G keeps coming back. This morning, when I offered to put a book on hold from the library for him, he responded with a vacant smile and lispy voice, a hapless child looking up at the librarian. Mama has a library card! Do you know Mama? She gets books for me!

Gabriel and I have a long history of this. We play our cats as 1930s mobsters (how we cope with the dark suspicion that we are neglectful pet owners - imagining asthmatic Lulu as Lu Capone). We pretend to be Winston Churchill-adjacent clueless arrogant colonists (how we cope with the moral discomfort of our privilege - what what!). We are affectless Russian dissidents straight from the gulag (a check on complaining about minor discomforts). 

Sometimes we voice insects, just for fun. Gabriel and Beatrice still reference my old man caterpillar voice, a character I invented many years ago while watching a slow caterpillar face off with a bunch of energetic ants.

So of course we're managing the strangeness of this transition summer with absurdist humor. 

When I was expecting a second child, I thought: this will be a breeze! I know how to get a baby to take a nap and a bottle, no problem. But then the second child arrived and he was a completely different person with completely different needs. One has to learn how to do things all over again.  

Going off to college? Same delusion. I did this with Frances (yep, it was brutal). I even did a trial run and said goodbye to Gabriel at the AT trailhead. He was on the trail for roughly a semester. So this is no big deal, right? I'm practiced! 

But I am beginning to realize it doesn't matter. You can't prepare for these massive upheavals in life. (You can pretend to all you want). They happen. That is all. 

I will not be able to laugh all the way to move in day. I know. I still carry the memory of my dad's grief when he and my mom dropped me off at Swarthmore over thirty years ago, so palpable in the way he fussed over setting up my desktop computer and stereo, and the uncharacteristic quiet leading up to our goodbye in a strange parking lot. His sorrow. It crushed me. 

Gabriel and I will do this our way. I'm gonna try not to do any damage with my sadness. (And how else did your mother burden you with her overpowering emotions, Gabriel?) But I know he already feels it. You can't get around it, not even with the finest hijinks and hilarity. Mama is Mama. Gabriel is Gabriel. My dear boy is growing up.  

best day of the year

Tomorrow my dead husband would be 51 years old, and my alive boyfriend will be 51 years old. 

Isn't that super weird?

It'll be my fifth attempt to celebrate their birthdays on the same day, and I'm not sure repetition has made me any better at it. On the first May 23rd, I drove to Thomas' place in Philly for lunch, handed him a gift, and burst into tears.

I learned that they were born on the very same day on our first date. Also gleaned from that conversation: like Mike, Thomas grew up in a Catholic family and has three sisters. I asked for a tour of his (visible) tattoos that night, so didn't learn until later about Jacques Derrida's face inked on Thomas' shoulder. Mike went to grad school in part to learn about him from a particular scholar, and once, in the pre-GPS era, wound up chauffeuring Derrida to dinner during a conference; thank goodness Jacques was unaware that Mike possessed the worst sense of direction on the planet. Despite this they somehow arrived on time, without incident.

This strange cosmic alignment feels like God taking me firmly by the shoulders and saying: you can't have a second love in your life without confronting the fact that you do because you lost your first to tragic illness and death, because of the person you became in the aftermath, because many realities live inside you. It is all deeply, intimately connected; don't try and pretend it isn't!

Once, lying in bed in the harrowing days after his stem cell transplant, Mike and I were talking about what would happen after he died. I didn't want to be having that conversation. I remember looking away at the blue walls, the embroidered bedspread, anywhere but his face. He said something about how I'd probably have another husband someday. 

But I don't want another husband, I said, suddenly turning to him. I have a husband! 

Yes, he replied. But after I die, we won't be married anymore. Until we are parted by death. That's what we said to each other. 

That was more than I could take in at the time. What could he possibly mean? Of course we would still be married after he died. 

But he was right. I am a widow and we aren't married anymore. And the idea of marrying again? Now I kinda like the idea. I even like that I like it. On May 23rd God shines a light on the fact that the me who once curled over in pain at the very idea of having a different husband, and the me who smiles thinking about how on my wedding day my girls could style me however they'd like for once live in the same body. 

The desperately besotted twenty year old, the young mother reading aloud contentedly to her children, the purist, the perfectionist, the philosopher's wife who too often swallowed her anger, the caregiver, the advocate, the cook, the yogi, the sounding board, the woman uncertain if she would ever find her own professional footing, the tentative writer, the woman who was too quick to turn away from her own heart to accommodate the needs of others. Mike knew all those parts of me well. 

He didn't live to know the other parts that have grown stronger in his absence, and how the aforementioned parts have morphed and stretched, as our marvelous children grow older and I become more closely acquainted with my own heart. My confidence and skillfulness as a therapist, widowhood-anchored strength, growing comfort with my own imperfections, intentional efforts to release the preoccupation with being good. Now I can be boundaried, pissed, absurd, disagreeable. Not often. But it's possible. I treasure that possibility! I can be a protagonist who lets herself want things, all kinds of things, including a middle-aged, serious, playful, inconveniently long-distance love with a man born on May 23rd.

Mike always said it was the best day of the year. 

Thomas is evidence supporting that claim. How wonderful that he was born and lived a whole life whose paths curved closely to - but never touched - my own, until our respective contained multitudes collided at the moment they did. And that he generously and patiently makes space for my mixed up, grief-tinted May 23rd feelings - and on his birthday no less! 

I can't wait to see him tomorrow. 

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.