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.

not knowing

I came down to my kitchen grumpily on Saturday morning, after a fitful night of sleep. A lone soup spoon lay face down in the drain of the little bar sink, surrounded by a spray of coffee grounds and looking not unlike a murder victim. We normally use that sink exclusively for drinking water, and so without any other dish-washing happening, the spoon had remained there untouched for at least three days. 

In an ill-fated private experiment enacted by countless mothers before me, I was waiting to see how long it would languish there before someone noticed. Predictably, no one had bothered to put it in the dishwasher. I knew if I didn't move the pathetic lonely thing, no one would, and that depressed me.

But my boyfriend came for the weekend, and even though he was suffering from post-vaccine ickiness, he must have eventually done what my children would not, because the spoon and it's surrounding mess disappeared. It's for the best that he inadvertently cut my experiment short. In this particular round, I ultimately wasn't feeling resentful of my kids. I was instead experiencing a kind of familiar, floundering fitfulness before my own shortcomings as a parent: why haven't I taught them to take responsibility for their environment?

I've been having a hard time finding the balance of things lately. I'm observing certain places where the fabric is wearing thin, but I'm not sure what to do about it. It seems I should have figured out things like housekeeping and parenting and managing work and the rest of life better by now; the problem is no matter how much experience I accrue, things are always shifting under my feet. 

How is it that I can feel so discouraged? Frances is at Princeton doing beautifully, Gabriel is home this fall working and saving up for his thru hike in the spring, and Beatrice is no longer a little girl who fights me at bedtime. She is twelve years old and knows how to bake an exquisite chocolate chip cookie.

But all the same, I often feel that I am wanting in my ability to captain this ship, and we are teetering on the edge of chaos. I doublebook orthodontist appointments and clients, haircuts and meetings. Empty seltzer cans stand watch over stacks of unread New Yorkers that slide around the surface of the coffee table, while dirty socks are huddled up beneath it. I can't seem to find time to take the stacks of paper recyclables to the place with terrible hours, or call my liability insurance with my questions. The toilet paper holder is broken and I don't know how to fix it. Even my body is chaotic: my shoulder hurts. Or sometimes my knees. My period is totally whack. My god, just think what will happen to us when menopause really gets underway...!

Even though I've parented two twelve year olds before, parenting twelve year old Beatrice is it's own thing. I can only learn to do this from and with her. And I can only parent her as the woman I have become, someone who lives in an older body, has more responsibility at work, and who is more comfortable acknowledging her own need for care, rest, and independent pursuits (like my new private practice and my Thursday night dance rehearsals). When Frances and Gabriel were twelve, I was willing to sacrifice my own well-being. I was taking care of my ill husband, and then I was newly widowed with three young children. Back then I didn't see any other way we were going to survive. 

Now we are forty-eight. I like to see my friends and exercise; also I am navigating screens, middle school dynamics, chores, and schedules with my youngest and more often than not feeling at a loss. 

I've been reading Laurie Colwin (Happy All the Time and More Home Cooking), listening to Samin Nosrat on Fresh Air, and paging through old favorite cookbooks. All of these things fill me with tender longing. I'm building a private practice while working full time (there are good reasons) and the effort and hours this requires is likely related to how freshly appealing cooking has become, ideally with the people I love perched on stools nearby. Gabriel, back from 30 days in the Rockies, has led us on two camping weekends since school began. Cooking in the woods with my family! The gurgle of the little percolator over the fire! Even better. While packing for it is anything but, life becomes marvelously simple on a camping trip. Time unfurls luxuriously.  

On Saturday morning, I was still very much recovering from the over-full week and the hit my house, parenting, and nervous system had taken in response. But last night I cooked a delicious dinner from CSA eggplants and green beans (vegetables that had been stressing me out during the week, looking at me accusingly every time I opened the fridge and threatening to go bad before I had time to cook them), watched a dumb movie snuggled up with Beatrice and Thomas, and slept deeply. Today I went to church, took a long walk in a wooded park with Thomas and Ramona where I had a cry about my various worries, and baked a pumpkin chocolate chip loaf with Beatrice. Gabriel and Beatrice and I did our grateful grace at dinner, and talked about college applications and school projects and whether or not I should buy a pair of silver shoes.

I still don't know how to do this. Widowed parenting is it's own kind of thing, full of rushing love, mind reading, and gut punches - with no breaks. They don't put the spoons away, because I do. There is so much more for me to learn, so many more moments of feeling desperately at a loss ahead. 

I won't know what to do. But we can always sit down to dinner - at the table half covered in homework and laundry, or under a canopy of trees - and bolstered by that ritual well-soaked in faith and love, be reminded that it's okay not to know. We find our way anyhow.

on two incidents of crying in public

I drove Gabriel and my mother through shocking amounts of traffic to the Atlanta airport on Wednesday afternoon, arriving with less padding time-wise than we'd anticipated. It took us nearly three hours to get there from the peaceful mountaintop in Western North Carolina where Gabriel had spent the previous six weeks. The most stimulation he encountered there came in the forms of cacophonous birdsong, campers shout-singing during Morning Circle, thunderstorms, and Sunday texting on his grayscaled iphone10.  

We walked from the short term parking lot to the ticketing area for United. I watched his wide eyes set in his alert, expressionless face scanning the vast space filled with hundreds of other faces and the accompanying sound of hundreds of wheeled suitcases bumping along the tiled floor, trying to make sense of it all. 

We checked his duffle. We'd spent the morning packing all his gear, checking off items one at a time from a five page long list. I watched his tricep muscles tighten as he leaned over the desk to fill out an identification tag and wondered. 

And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful boy.

And yet. There we were. 

My mom opted to wait for us, safe in an eddy outside the women's room while we entered the rushing current of people barreling towards the TSA line.

We did not speak. I could see his mind calculating the length of the line, the amount of time needed to get to his gate, whether he'd need to take one of those trains through the airport terminals as our feet moved one after another beneath us, propelling us towards our parting.  

And then we hugged goodbye. His body was tensed to face the challenges ahead. I told him I loved him and watched him walk briskly off, into the line, into the next 30 days.

I exhaled. I stood very still after he'd left my sight, and I cried. 

An airport worker walked by, then slowed to look back over her left shoulder at me. She wore large cat's eye glasses with translucent blue frames and perfect pink lipstick. She said, are you alright honey?

Yes, I nodded pathetically, still crying. I'm okay.

She turned on her heel and walked right back towards me. 

There's no crying in my airport! she said as she opened her arms and pulled me into a full embrace. 

I collapsed into her. He'll be fine, I sobbed. I felt I had to both explain my behavior and indicate that I was still rational, but she could've cared less. She released me with some more clucking maternal noises and went off to do her job. I felt loved by this stranger, and that made me cry more. 

Soon after my mom and I made our way back into the brutal summer Atlanta traffic, we learned his flight to Denver was delayed. And delayed again. And finally delayed so much that he wouldn't be able to catch his connecting flight to Wyoming, which was one of only two flights to Riverton, Wyoming each day, and so I began a series of phone calls to reschedule his travel and coordinate with his NOLS program and arrange a stay with our friends in Boulder that night. 

After many hours of this during our drive north, including an extended conversation with an incredibly nice woman named Marlene who runs Gator Creek Taxi in Riverton, in the end Gabriel managed to make his flight and land in Wyoming a little before 2 am EST. He didn't have his bag, but he didn't care. He made it! And somehow his canceled shuttle was miraculously waiting and brought him to Lander. And so his NOLS adventure began.

I don't know what to make of all the ways I have been feeling ever since Gabriel sat me down in the dining hall at camp one year ago to tell me his plan: graduating high school a year early and taking a gap year to hike the Appalachian Trail before he went to college. I had arrived early to volunteer at camp before driving him and Beatrice home and I had not expected him to tell me that. I mostly just listened, impressed by his resolve, disoriented by the idea of losing out on an entire year of him at home.

We got home and he set about making it happen. He changed his schedule and status from junior to senior. He deepened his connections with a cohort of senior friends. We went on college visits. He went to prom and graduation and senior week. He applied to be a CIT this summer at camp.

I was the one that suggested this NOLS course. I knew it would be stressful getting him directly from camp to Wyoming. I knew the gear list would make my head hurt. I knew we'd miss him like crazy for 30 days with no contact at all after six weeks in North Carolina. But I also suspected it would be the kind of formative experience that stays with a person forever. And I knew I'd be a lot less nervous about the months of thru hiking with his good friend that lay ahead.

Now he's been out in the field for five days. On his third day in the Rockies, I went with Beatrice and Thomas and his daughter Junah to see our longtime favorites, Ballet X, perform their summer series in Philadelphia. I especially wanted to see a piece called The Last Glass, set to music by Beirut, of which I knew little besides it was a company favorite and featured joyful, expressive movement.

The piece is organized around couples who come together in community as a whole, but also perform a series of pas de deux that each tell a story. Every dancer has a distinct character. And while there are a variety of compelling interpersonal challenges expressed in their dances, the character who struck me most deeply - the quiet persistent center of the whole piece - was the one whose challenge stems from the fact that her partner is dead. At least that was my interpretation. She wanders the stage alone sometimes, curled in on herself in pain, looking for something that we can't see. And sometimes she dances with a man dressed all in white who continually slips through her fingers just when she seems to be relaxing into his presence. His face eludes her hands; his body slides along the floor into the wings as she helplessly watches him go. A cruel trick. The other couples danced around her.

It made me cry.

Her physicality sent me back to the weeks and months after Mike died, when my body hurt all the time. It was like taking punches to the gut over and over. Curling in on oneself, barely breathing. How memories comfort until the floor suddenly opens beneath you in the brute pain of absence (there's that cruel trick). I didn't think about those excruciating days sitting in the audience and on the walk back to the car; I rather breathlessly watched the dancers while a part of me felt that deep embodied grief. 

(Beatrice, later: isn't it amazing that a dance can bring up so much emotion?)

(And there is something there too, about how I didn't want therapy and talking then so much as tending to my hurting body. I needed hands on my skin, breath in my lungs. And how now, I dance.)

After all the tears, I thought about my completely unexpected response to that dance. My mom and I had a lot of time together driving to pick up Gabriel and take him to the airport; some of our conversations centered around my kids. How they are growing up. How we made it through some terrible times together.

On one of the rare searing moments when Mike and I acknowledged that he might die of his relentless disease and leave me a widow and the children fatherless, I had a bright flash of knowing run through me. We'll be okay, I told him. I will live for them. Then we cried together.

It was true. Especially in the beginning. I lived for them. 

They kept me getting up in the morning and making breakfasts and packing lunches and going to work. All I wanted was to give them respite from the pain of illness and death; I wanted to give them normal life, to cover up all the glaring not-normalness of where we found ourselves. 

We have all healed and grown so much since then. But for a very long time they were the anchors I clung to for dear life. They have been a cover when I couldn't bear to be responsible for myself. At times I have hidden away behind their sparkling presences; it takes real intention and effort to allow my own priorities to be important, even now, when they encourage me to. 

And now they are leaving. Our unit exists intact in our hearts and minds; not so much on the earth where we are rarely all in the same place. Frances is in Buenos Aires, Gabriel is in Wyoming, Beatrice is on an overnight trip with a friend and her family. I am sitting in a Starbucks outside Philadelphia.

That dancer also tapped my grief over my boy's departure; over the way my children rooted me in the life that I built for them from our old rubble, only to grow up and leave it. 

They are becoming healthy, independent, adventuresome, brilliant, funny young adults - just the way a mother might hope they would. It's ideal; it's shocking. How could they? 

I am grateful to them for helping me survive the most crushing loss imaginable. And - yes, it's true! - also grateful to them for growing up, and without their needs to hide behind, forcing me into another no-net style chapter of growth and discovering in ever deeper ways what I feel, what I want, who I will become.

Gabriel, I can't believe you left a year early. Gabriel, my heart sings for you, and for all of us. 

marking the occasion

I was walking down the central thoroughfare in the grocery store today after work, and slowed my pace to peer down an aisle, trying to remember if we needed canned beans. There I spied a narrow back belonging to a fair-headed man in a t shirt and black jeans. He was leaning over his cart, elbows resting on the handle as he made some similar domestic calculation. I saw him fleetingly, less than a second as I walked by, but the hunch of his shoulders was so like Mike. Something about the frame, the posture. What a gut punch. A gut-and-heart punch. I pulled over in the next aisle and looked at the teas, breathing, waiting for the tears tightening my throat to relax and sink back down to their usual quiet depths. Mike. You surprised me.

Tomorrow will mark fifty years since he was born. 

And it will mark fifty years since my boyfriend Thomas was born.

It will mark forty-nine years since my glamorous twenty-five year old parents were married in Pittsburgh, and 104 years since my grandfather was born in Texas, the only child of Roy and Fay Howell, who were forty and thirty-nine years old at the time. (How long did they struggle with infertility? Were there miscarriages? How unlikely was his birth?)

I saw on Instagram yesterday that May 23rd is a favorite barre and dance teacher's birthday too. Is she also part of the mysterious cosmic conspiracy revolving around tomorrow's date, to which I may well owe the most important parts of me, the most important of all being my very existence? Probably! 

In six days I will take Frances to the Philadelphia airport to fly to Buenos Aires for a summer internship. In seven days I will file into our town's minor league baseball stadium to cheer on seven hundred McCaskey High School graduates, and my shining son Gabriel will be among them. A few days after that I will help him pack many disparate items off an extensive packing list that I cannot seem to contend with yet and cram them into our little EV, and drive him to the Smoky Mountains for 6 weeks of being a CIT followed directly by a month of adventuring in Wyoming. 

And tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Beatrice from four days on the Chesapeake Bay with her fellow sixth graders, just in time to take a rhubarb upside down cake to the cemetery where we can cry and laugh in that sacred place that brings us a hair's breath closer to Mike than we are in regular life. Then on Saturday we'll go to Philadelphia to celebrate Thomas's half century on this planet in style. He will be fifty years old, and that is very, very good. I smile typing it.  

I have zero answers in response to the open question that is tomorrow. How can Mike and Thomas have the exact same birthday?* How can a person grieve and celebrate all at once? How can I find the vast space I need inside to hold it all? 

And more than that, how I can live these impossibilities while I continue to go through the many motions required to help my two oldest children set out for distant shores and become ever more independent of the nest I have poured my heart into for the past twenty years? This nest barely resembles that one I first feathered with Mike. It's full of lanky teenage boys' laughter, skin care products, a lunatic barking dog, opinions about protein intake, episodes of The Americans, internet-fueled slang I cannot keep up with, cat hair, smelly running shoes, expensive ice cream, and interruption-peppered conversations about politics and school and relationships and history and AI and media and books and other people and feelings. These days, the only thing I'm allowed to read out loud to them is the Vows section of the Sunday Times (thanks Beatrice). 

Nonetheless this nest, such as it is, holds our shared memories of being a family of five. The exquisite heaviness of all the change hits me hard sometimes. It's my forever problem - one more impossible space to live inside of - I love to see them grow, and I love them just exactly the way they are right now. 

So, right. No answers. Only love-as-grief, love-as-tenderness, love-as-unease, love-as-bafflement. 

In other words a heart, full to the brim.

*Astrologists, I welcome your thoughts. 

don't leave

Not too long ago, Gabriel got his drivers license. The fact that he passed his test and has a little plastic card with his picture on it tucked in a silicon slot affixed to the back of his phone has not magically put me at ease when I am in the passenger seat and he is behind the wheel. I am vigilant as ever.

So when we were making a left out of the alley behind our house into two way traffic, a maneuver that features terrible visibility due to the cars parked along the street, I said to Gabriel, 'you know, I still have to close my eyes every time you do this.' 

'Me too, Ma,' he confided in turn. 

It took me a beat. Then my eyes flew open, and I turned and punched his arm. He was already laughing, eyes wide open and fixed on the road.

'Got ya.'

He did. For half a second, I believed that when he makes that scary turn and can't quite see who is coming from the left he closes his eyes and hopes for the best because that made sense to me. Let the other drivers of the world decide if this is a bad idea. Let the winds of chance determine if I survive this left turn. 

I've been thinking about it since. My younger self often closed her eyes, relinquished her own agency. Making an identity, asserting myself socially, taking risks, blazing my own trail - all of this was so hard. I longed for authentic expression, though I had no idea what that might look like in practice. Plus I was terrified of judgment. I didn't want to give anyone the chance to confirm my worst suspicions about myself. 

Poor dear.

That might explain the series of charismatic and controlling girls I befriended growing up, girls who were the protagonists while I played nice girl sidekick. I could feel my own edges begin to dissolve before the heat of their glittering presence, and I liked it.  

At least at first. Eventually I'd feel confined and resentful, but that initial thrill of dissolution and lightness was wildly compelling. Even as I got older and chose friends more wisely, I absolutely loved the runaway quality of good chemistry, and would happily stay up too late, skip a class, lie to my parents, whatever discomfort was required to sustain the pleasure of feeling my boundaries blur, of forgetting myself. 

People who go on guided psychedelic trips often report a profound experience of oneness with everything. They could also try laughing uncontrollably in a feedback loop to exhaustion with a girlfriend as an alternate path to spiritual unity. Your ego falls away; you are all presence, all connection. It's the best.

'Your friends are your crack,' my dad once declared to me in our kitchen. I was appalled. And anguished. How to explain to him that I didn't always like the ways I accommodated my friends' whims? How I struggled to set any boundaries at all? 

Of course when I fell in love for the first time, it was friendship crack times a thousand. It felt so good to take risks and break rules for someone else. To feel my wheels running off the road, to close my eyes and turn into whatever the oncoming traffic had in store. 

I think that a more grown up version of this was at work in my marriage. There was the delight of merging and the relief of not having to be responsible for my whole person. (Did I admit that to myself? I did not.) Mike made the big decisions; I busily made the everyday decisions that filled in their spaces. 

He picked the suburban house we bought in Annapolis, and I rode his confidence that it was the best choice for us, that we wanted the neighborhood and big yard for the kids, a vegetable garden, his native plant obsessions. And we were such a we, I could not tell you even now if that was the best thing for me or not. But I was the one pushing children on the swing set and weeding the garden while the mosquitoes drained me dry. Mike managed our budget and finances, and decreed a life of simplicity and frugality, which seemed virtuous and like something I could sign on to. I mean, I love thrifting! Eating low on the food chain! I made so many excellent pots of beans over the years.

I treasure those memories. I'm genuinely happy our kids had that landscape in their early lives. And yet. Would I have chosen it all if I was in charge? Could I even fathom then what it would mean to be in charge? To assert my difference? To say no thanks, I'd rather buy new shoes and an iced latte and some more freaking child care? 

I traded some of the burden of my existential responsibility for the security and pleasure of being loved. For safety, for those delicious moments of transcendent connection. But when you make that trade, you are loved through a glass darkly. There are distortions; it's built into the deal. 

You be in charge, and I will be the version of myself I believe you want me to be. My younger self made adjustments. I was afraid to say no; I was afraid to want more. Maybe I wouldn't be as lovable.

Along with a million other viewers, I streamed Conclave last week. In one scene, a priest comes to the dean of the Vatican, played by Ralph Fiennes, sharing that he has discovered information that sheds a negative light on one of the cardinals who may soon be elected to the papacy. This has come after other disturbing disclosures, and the dean loses his temper. He tells the other priest not to tell him what he has learned. He hates to talk about other priests like this. More than that, he hates to be in the leadership position he is in. Don't tell me, I don't want to know, because then I'll be responsible for that knowledge. 

Leave it in God's hands, he tells the priest. 

I found him so frustrating in that moment that I yelled at the screen. He was putting God in the spot I had at various times put my best friends and boyfriends and husband, afraid to take up his full subjectivity, integrity, responsibility for his own existence and duty to others. This mortal coil can be a real bitch. Close your eyes, nose the car forward. Call it piety, that sounds pretty nice. I get it.

I wish Mike never knew anything at all about lymphoma. I wish he never suffered so terribly, and I wish he had not died. And the excruciating loneliness and disorientation and endless solitary decisions I had to navigate after his death led me to learn so many things. 

I met with an AEDP therapist for about a year during the pandemic, tucked away wherever I could find a modicum of privacy in my house while Beatrice slid notes under the door asking for snacks and screen time. Even so, it was transformative. In one session, I found myself, with my therapist's help, trying to listen to what my heart was telling me. It was hard. I had to be so quiet and patient. But then it came, clear as a bell. Don't leave me. My heart said, don't leave me. 

When I met Thomas, I worried at myself. What about closing my eyes, what about the dissolving boundaries? Was this love? Because I kept saying when I didn't like something, or did like something, and even, with his support, sharing things that might be hard for him to hear, that might cause conflict. 

I want to teach my 20 year old self and my 12 year old self what this is like. Being more fully myself in the wide world of other people with so much safety inside. It is a treasure of middle age.  

I knew just what my heart meant that day. Don't leave me again. You just got here. Even in the long laughs, the long kisses. Don't go. 

So I haven't. 

not despite but because

I had a long day at work. After responding to a few last emails before I packed up my things to go home, I succumbed to a very strange impulse. I opened Facebook. I do this sometimes - check texts or social media or personal email after I finish up everything for the day at my office. It's a little time-sucking bridge between work and everything waiting for me at home. 

The first thing I saw was a post from a member of my online widows' group. She shared that it is her daughter's 20th birthday, and before this milestone, the waves of grief kept cresting and crashing because her husband wasn't here to behold their daughter's exquisite young adult self. And because she had promised him to keep the world beautiful and compassionate for their daughter, despite the crushing loss of him. It had been really hard to do that while carrying her own grief. 

I paused at my desk, feeling those words work their way into my tired body. Frances will be 20 this summer too. 

I responded to the post. I wrote that her boundless love, and her husband's, were so much bigger than loss could ever be for her daughter, who is out in the world doing incredible things. Their love buoys and supports her, offers a bright lens through which to see the world. It felt true as I wrote it.

I then abruptly closed my laptop and shoved it in my backpack, shut the door on my darkened office, and walked down the quiet hall - everyone else was already gone - out into the dusky light of evening. I went home where I was grateful to learn that my son and his friend were making dinner tonight, and so leashed up my dog for her walk with a bit of urgency in my step.

Maybe it was just the stress of the day that quickened my pace. Or the heaviness of my friend's post that I needed to move through. In any case, Ramona was initially delighted to trot along briskly with me, but when she insistently stopped to sniff the fire hydrant a block from my house I impatiently paused and waited. 

I sighed. I looked up.

And there was the sky!  

Bright pink feathery clouds in the west scudded across a purple-blue expanse. I watched them glide casually in the last gasp of light, as if it was no big thing to be a pink cloud in a glowing sky, as if there was nothing to see here, you people down on College Avenue going about your business while we do our regular old sunset thing up here all over again. 

The sight made me catch my breath, standing there while my dog sniffed and considered whether or not to pee on the hydrant and neighbors dragged their trash and recycling bins out to the curb. Here we all were, scurrying about beneath this impossible beauty, these ethereal pink forms stretching out so close to earth. It was not business as usual! I could feel my heart yearning so hard it hurt. 

I thought of my friend feeling the pain of her husband's absence, and the pain of all the years of her husband's absence. I thought of Mike, and how I saw the world when he was sick and in the early days after his death; it was so beautiful it nearly crushed me. There was nothing left to protect me from it. Ramona and I walked a little slower, said hello to the neighbors we passed with open faces. Even as the sky began to darken and the glow subsided, my neighborhood and all the people and animals and plants in it beneath the now-gray forms above remained heartbreakingly beautiful.

I was wrong. It's not that our experience of love is bigger than our experience of loss, which thus preserves the goodness of the world. It's that our love-soaked experience of loss, our broken hearts - if we're lucky - leave us cracked open to the beauty and compassion of the world. We see it, we feel it, we cannot shut it off or escape it. We perceive it with greater clarity than we did before. 

It is a treasure, all of it. The faces of strangers, the sky at dusk. It glows so bright it hurts our eyes. 

Our children learned too soon, a pain I would take away in a heartbeat if I could. Yet they are open to grace. They cannot unsee the beauty and compassion of the world, and now they are living into that truth. Vidita, your promise is kept. 

every moment is this moment

Yesterday morning I picked my way over the dark patch of ice at the bottom of my back stairs that has been growing by the day as the dryer vent in our alley melts the gathered snow there and sends it trickling towards the back door, where it promptly freezes in just the right spot for a rushing person to slide and fall. But I didn't! Then I avoided stepping in the forlorn little lumps of frozen dog poop in the backyard snow, made it to my parked car, drove the distance I really should be walking downtown, found a great parking spot, and made it to 8:30 am cardio barre class on time. Another triumph! (I am chronically three minutes late to everything.) 

And then two minutes into our warm up, feeling the pleasant effects of heat growing in my winter body to the encouraging sounds of Beyonce, my lower back totally freaked out. Pain happened. It was sudden and intense and I felt disoriented - what? huh? - and slowed my pace. It was a quintessential middle aged moment. So much was going right. I was feeling good and anticipating coming home after class, showering, packing Frances' things into the car and driving her to Princeton, where we'd go out to lunch and have a last gasp of carefree time together before her semester started. 

And then my body contemplated all this, looked around, noticed the accumulated stress of an intense week at work including many more seated therapy sessions than she is used to, noted the way I was throwing up my knees with Saturday morning abandon, and yelled: I object! 

And I was all like: well, that's fine for you lady, but I want to finish this class and have my day and you can't stop me. 

Yeah. Well, she wasn't into that. By the time I got back to my car an hour later to drive home, I could barely lower myself into the driver's seat. I gasped with pain. I hobbled into the house, where Frances had already lugged the big suitcase down to the back door and was getting ready to leave. The mere sight of her heavy object made my back throb more insistently. 

I told her about my back as I reached for the Advil. She treated my body with a lot more kindness than I had. She was patient, compassionate, and offered to drive. She loaded all her things into the car while I carried my coffee. On the ride, every time I shifted position in the seat, I made little ouchy noises, and she made little mothery noises back: oh, oh Mama, be careful, are you okay?

And we did all the things - slowly. We talked about everything in the car, as we do. We stopped at a madhouse of a Trader Joe's and got lots of snacks and loved it. We had enormous burritos for lunch, bulging packages of comfort resting on little aluminum trays lined with brown paper. We delivered one load of things to her dorm room, where she greeted her chipper roommate who was puzzling over her course schedule and whether she could possibly squeeze into a class with 15 people on the waitlist ahead of her. We walked back to the car to get the rest of it, which turned out to be a mere yoga mat and the bag of groceries. As I opened the car door to get them, my back yelped extra hard.

I think I should probably say goodbye to you here, I told her. I need to get home to a heating pad. 

Oh, she said. 

But I didn't want her to go. I didn't want our day to end. So we sat in the car together and held hands and talked some more. I told her it had been such a good break. I so enjoyed having her in home mode, slipped back into family routines and conversations, rested and restored, and even though it was good and right to do it, a part of me really hated to see her slide back into school mode. I would miss her. 

I felt so close to my eldest daughter. And it was time to say goodbye.

I was a lackluster hugger, what with my weirdo back, but she didn't complain. Then we kept on goodbye-ing as I stood empty-handed next to the car, and she walked away from me holding her heavy sack of yogurts and kombucha and dry shampoo, wearing her elegant camel-colored long wool coat and her beautiful dark hair in braids and looking very much the Princeton student. She smiled and said something about how I probably won't hear from her much because she'll be so busy this week. Her face was so open and beautiful. So her. I saw a flash of her bright curious two year old self, and a surge of uncomplicated and enormous love moved through my 47 year old body.

We are getting older. And sometimes, like in the Wawa parking lot adjacent to campus yesterday, time folds in and back, circling, and every moment is this moment. 

*    *    *    *    *

I made it home, where Gabriel and Beatrice were also kind and patient with me. Gabriel had friends over to play a game, and Beatrice and I set up pillows and a heating pad and a laptop in my big bed and watched A Real Pain and ate ice cream together. Now I want to go on a Holocaust tour to the places in Europe where my family comes from with an unhinged depressed charming cousin too. 

When I woke this morning, the sun was shining, my heart was full, and my back felt much, much better. 

feeling like a person

Hello, dear friends. Hello!

It's been a very long time since I've written. I've been out here flying free in the world, without the act of writing in this space to anchor and connect me to all of you.

And though I have missed it, the absence was intentional. 

A little over a year ago, I began learning about representation in the book business world, and tapping my connections in an effort to pitch my manuscript (based on writing from this blog) to agents. I discovered many things, including the fact that loss and grief aren't particularly marketable; despite that I used every free scrap of time I could find to further my project along. Each cold email I sent was terrifying and sometimes exhilarating for me, a person who has never easily identified as a writer nor tried to push my writing beyond the safety of the fuzzy internet and out into the bright lights and bottom lines of publishing. 

I'm glad I tried. But as a widowed solo parent in her forties with a demanding job who was unwilling to give up the treasure of sleep, it seemed there was never enough time to pitch and research and rewrite and package things as I wanted. Plus I secretly wasn't convinced I had something worthwhile to share. All the same, I took it for what it was, donned a classic fake it til you make it jumpsuit, and gave it a go. 

I attached samples and pitched; I got a few kind and thoughtful rejections in return. One agent encouraged me to try my hand at writing about my therapy clients, as readers are far more interested in the mental health of young people than in the grief of an unknown widow. 

In those days my imagination was forever reaching around, fueled by an amorphous urgency, drifting away from the stuff of life and towards the stuff of shoulds. I should write about my clients! Great idea. I'll think about that and write some notes after dinner with my kids. And I should rewrite the first chapter to make it less depressing. I should probably try to develop a social media presence and then pitch again, so agents will think someone out there will want to buy this book. Maybe I should write some op-eds. About grief. Or the pathologies of college students! Definitely. As soon as this session is over I'll start one.

Actually, I should just be a better writer. And a better self-marketer. I should be someone who is brave and talented enough to have taken some writing risks before the wizened old age of forty-seven. Let's face it: I should be a real freaking artist and yet, here I am! What am I even doing with my life, anyway?  

The shimmering should-cloth that had momentarily billowed gracefully, then settled over the complicated shape of my life with a dark weight, was becoming utterly terrible.

It was good to try something scary. It was bad to feel like a failure. And it was worse still to feel that the things I work at and pour my heart into every day and night were simply not good enough. 

It also kinda sucked that I was distracted by my scattered efforts and thoughts about being a Real Published Writer. I probably slid right by a lot of terrific moments with my kids over dinner.

So by Thanksgiving I decided to take a break from it all, and told myself that I would return to this in the summer, when I would have the entire month of July off work and thus time to dedicate myself anew to becoming the writer I imagined I should be.

When July came around, for the first time in nineteen years, I had two weeks to myself. Beatrice and Gabriel were at camp, and Frances was in New York. I drove Beatrice to our beloved UU retreat center in Western North Carolina to join Gabriel who was already there, then visited various friends in Asheville and the surrounding area and met my boyfriend for a few days at an airbnb in the woods. Beforehand I told myself: this will be your retreat! A traveling writing retreat. You and your laptop will occupy cafes and front porches in your favorite mountains and come out on the other side with something to show for it.

But guess what happened when I got there? I drove my car from place to place along winding mountain roads with the windows down, breathing in the green damp forest and listening to music. I reconnected with wonderful friends. Nearly every day I hiked in the mountains - sometimes alone, usually with someone special. I woke up one morning at a friends' home on a hilltop and watched two mother deer and two fawns grazing out my bedroom window. I wandered out to find Will on the screened in porch, settled in a rocking chair with the French press behind him and a heavy ceramic mug in hand, watching the hummingbirds swoop and flutter at the feeder. He had named them all. I sat beside him so that he could introduce me. 

When I met up with my boyfriend Thomas, we spent every day similarly in our little cabin: waking up slowly, listening and watching, making coffee, planning a day of hiking and then setting out to find the trailheads situated off serpentine roads, drinking local beer and cooking simple dinners at the end of the day. Everything tasted so good. 

Besides a few postcards, I didn't write a word. I didn't want to. 

I ended my independent sojourn back at The Mountain, where I volunteered for three days with the middle school camp before my children's sessions were over and we three drove home. But on the day I arrived, I sat on the dining hall porch in the misty weather with Gabriel and his friend Emerson to hear about all they had experienced over the past seven weeks, and to tell them about my trip too. 

I struggled to tell them why the past days had been exquisite, when I had been responsible for no one but myself. It's been so good, I told them. Every morning I wake up whenever I wake up. Then I pack a lunch and eventually take a beautiful long hike. Peanut butter and jelly has never tasted so good. And I sleep so well at night. My body feels so peaceful. I feel like...I feel like...

Hmmm. What did I feel like, exactly?

Sixteen year old lanky Emerson, who'd been listening with his elbows resting on his knees and his head bent low, suddenly lifted it and looked at me. 

Like a person?

Yes! That's it! I feel like a person. 

The boys smiled at me, and I smiled back at them. They'd had a whole summer of feeling like people. They knew.

It took a two week break from mothering, therapizing, leading my counseling service, taking care of my pets and my house and my community as well as consciously ignoring my long-standing intentions to write, for me to know in my bones that simply existing was good enough.  

I had to stop doing to realize the joyful sufficiency of being. 

Being alive! My animal self - fed and exercised and loved - shed her mind's layers of shoulds and not-enoughs in that gentle, welcoming landscape, and it restored me.

Adding "I should publish my writing" to my over-full life had turned it into a rat wheel. I spent last fall feeling bad about my limitations: my widowhood and unchosen solo parent status, my shaky ambition, my voice, my scant accomplishments. I could never arrive at the fullness of being alive because I was scrambling towards something imaginary that I did not have. 

I haven't written anything since those blessed days in North Carolina. Not until now. Because I wanted to!

I came away from that retreat (it turned out to be one of those after all) with a desire to dig into my life just exactly as it is. To bring my full self to my work, to be present to my children and all the people I love. To get the hell off my phone and spend some time staring out the window. And to walk in the mountains when I can.

 

Big hugs and gratitude to all of you,

Meagan

 

wonder-full

When I was a precocious toddler sporting a massive head of black hair in Dallas, Texas, we lived near a little girl who had renamed herself Wonder. My mom could tell you more about our old neighbor (including her given name), as I can only muster the fuzziest of memories. Blonde hair, skinny legs. Maybe she had accrued five or six years of experience to my two? I know I thought the world of her. We moved away when I was three.

Thinking of her now, given the late 70s timing, it seems likely that Wonder was an homage to Wonder Woman. But in my family, she lives on as the girl who wondered, who felt wonder before all this mind-blowing beauty - so much so that it became her name! 

I brought that spirit with me and my kids to Costa Rica in May. I found a window between AP tests and fifth grade promotion ceremonies, between the end of finals at Princeton and the start of summer internships, and I took it. We hadn't traveled internationally together since after Mike died, before the pandemic, when we went to an all-inclusive resort. That too was a major adventure for me, recently widowed and desperate enough to avoid the Christmas holiday at home without Mike that I signed on to take my 6, 11, and 14 year old children to Jamaica all by myself in December. I'd never done anything like that before, but the outrageous price tag was well worth it. It was a safe, abundant holiday spent sliding down water slides, licking ice cream cones, and basking in the sun.

But Costa Rica was something else entirely. Now I am a solo mother with an 11, 16, and almost-19 year old. I discovered my children can help me with navigation, managing stressful moments, and decision-making. They can hop out of the car to unlock the sliding gate that let us back into our Airbnb in the dark, laugh their way through class 4 rapids, speak far better Spanish than their mother, run through a Panamanian airport to make it to our connecting flight in time to board and indulge me when I insist they watch the video for Van Halen's 'Panama' on my little phone later on the drive home from BWI's long term parking lot. 

And because they are independent, capable young people, I could sit in the shade, digging my toes into the sand and watching three bobbing heads out in the clear blue Caribbean Sea, briefly imagining their conversation before turning back to my book in contentment or following the sounds of howler monkeys to take a peek at them climbing through the trees. 

I wondered at the stretches of time when I was not needed. When I was simply being, an animal in a landscape teeming with other animals who made themselves known to me whenever I sat still and waited. How did those novel states of non-vigilance - of embodied affinity with everything alive around me - come to happen exactly? It was mind-blowing. 

I wondered at my increasing sense of connection to my children. It was akin to their first days on this earth, when it was as if we inhabited one body, one nervous system, a fluid loop of call-and-response. Hunger, milk; exhaustion, sleep; touch and touch and touch. Except now our boundaries were blurring around our thoughts, emotional responses, stress levels. We picked up and put down conversations, told trip-generated jokes that somehow grew funnier the more times we told them, reacted to heat and hunger with the same brittle irritability. 

I kept on messaging my family, closest friends, and boyfriend to share what was happening during the trip because I wanted to. Those people still existed for me. But also, on an inexplicable irrational level, I began to feel that my children were all the community I ever wanted or needed. Sometimes we tease each other about the Brogan mind meld; this was something different, and just mine to experience. As we traveled home and my children began to reach out to their friends, talk about school and graduation parties, and plan their next social days at home, a part of me felt so sad. Reluctant to let go of our enclosed world of four. You guys, let's not go home! Let's stay like this, just a bit longer!

I don't think I've ever felt quite that way before. I love my children and their company, and I'm acutely aware of how important my other relationships are, in and of themselves, as well as in support my parenting. I really love the company of other adults; I really need breaks! And yet. I didn't even want it! It made me remember my dad's palpable grief every time we came home from a big vacation. My sister and I were happy to return to our friends and independent lives; he never wanted the trip to end. 

So, yes. I wondered at my big love for my children, and my utter satisfaction in their company. 

And finally, because the environment in Costa Rica is so extraordinary, I never took off my amazement goggles. Every time my eyes swept over a new landscape, I was looking for something special, and if I waited a moment, I almost always found it. Wonderful! Look, hummingbirds! Hibiscus! The clouds! A toucan! My eyes were always at the ready, and my hands ready to point out the special thing my eyes had found to my kids. 

I had a few experiences of seeing something out of the corner of my eye, getting excited, and reaching for one of their arms to get their attention...only to discover that the fin cresting the surface of the water far on the horizon was a snorkeler's flippers. Near the end of a steamy hike at the base of a volcano named Arenal, during which we had already spied incredible tropical birds, a rodent called an agouti hopping adorably in the forest, and unknown brilliantly-colored lizards, I gasped and grabbed Frances' arm as I heard crunching leaves and caught a flash of color around a bend in the trail. Quiet - there's something there!

I held my breath. My amazement eyes were ablaze in anticipation. 

Two hikers emerged through the trees. Oh, I said. Never mind. 

But actually, scrap that sheepish let down moment. Always mind. Why not be amazed? Two human beings! In this crazy jungle. Here with us. And the forty other people we've seen on the trail. Wow.

One afternoon, when I saw a little dog picking its way along the far off river bank from our raft, I was already in pointing mode. Because of the rushing water it was hard to hear each other, so I'd extend my arm and point with a flourish to indicate the amazing things I saw, like a heron flapping overhead. It didn't take long for my pointing arm to develop a life of its own. It flew out before I even registered what I was seeing. When it insistently thrust itself towards movement far ahead of us on the bank, within a second it became clear my pointer finger was not targeting a new fuzzy tropical mammal but rather a little black mutt. Someone's pet. Our guide in the back of the boat loudly objected over the roar of the river: that's just a dog!

I felt a little embarrassed. But then I smiled. I was being a baby all over again, pointing at this and that, amazed by garbage trucks and squirrels and other children, insisting on showing them to everyone else. When a baby points at a dog and looks at you with delight, amazement, and expectation of your agreement on the matter, who among us hesitates to offer it? A dog! Yes! There is a dog! Look at that doggie! Hi dog, bye dog! There goes the dog!

Babies see the world with amazement goggles. Or rather, they see the world. Later they learn to put on no-big-deal goggles. Business-as-usual, I-have-important-pressing-things-occupying-my-mind goggles. But it seems to me the beautiful constant impulse in a baby is: oh my goodness what is THAT? THAT is amazing! Let me show it to you! And then, finally, what is its name? Tell me, then we can keeping talking about it and holding it in our minds after it is gone. (Hence my futile flipping around in a Costa Rican bird book, searching for names).

So in that spirit, I dropped my embarrassment in the river and thought: I get to encounter this dog with my Costa Rican baby vision. I get to enjoy this transformation of the mundane into the incredible. That dog is amazing. It is walking around and sniffing and getting its paws wet, being super cute. 

Look everyone! A dog!

an early spring saturday

After a months-long hiatus that I feared was the natural conclusion to my nearly nineteen-year-long career as a maternal read-alouder, Beatrice surprised me last week by agreeing with some enthusiasm to the idea of reading Pride and Prejudice together. Thus began our rather agreeable turn about the room with Elizabeth Bennett, which has had no influence on my speech and writing whatsoever. 

The only problem was I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere, which seemed crazy in this house. It must be in the basement, I told Bea, where so many of Papa's program books are (boxes upon boxes, filled with all the St. John's program and philosophy books I couldn't bear to part with). I promised I would search for it over the weekend, and in the meantime, I read to her off the dread phone. 

We've been reading at night before bed, and in the morning on the walk to school and work. I arrived at my office on Thursday and Friday glowing, both with the pleasure of all that fantastic funny dialogue and the effects of the outrageously cold and windy March weather we've been having. The thing is, when we're reading I don't mind it at all. The shivering adds to the fun. After we part ways and I head to my office, I find the cold intolerable.  

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and in the afternoon Beatrice and I went to see Perfect Days with some friends. We curled up towards each other in the reclining seats, heads and knees just touching, a bucket of popcorn tucked into the triangle of space my body made, and holding hands through many of the scenes. I wasn't sure what she would make of such a quiet movie, but she (and I) loved it, and we agreed we would have happily spent another two hours with this taciturn public toilet cleaner as he went about his solitary day, smiling up at the Tokyo trees.

After we said goodbye to our friends and came home, there was laundry and kitchen clean up to do, and some trip planning over cocktails with my mother, as she and Gabriel are taking a vacation together this coming weekend to make up for their Iceland fiasco in the summer. Then Gabriel left to play poker with friends, and my mom invited Beatrice and I to come over for dinner a little later. She left to cook, and I realized I still hadn't looked for Pride and Prejudice.

So down I went into the kitty litter-strewn basement, where one by one, I slid boxes off their shelves and tipped them towards me, balanced on my thighs while I rummaged in their shadowy insides. Philosophy, philosophy, and more philosophy. Some Shakespeare. Theology. More philosophy. What time was it? I squatted down next to the very last box and slid it out. Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and ... a shoebox beneath these books labeled Mike's Keepsakes in Mike's handwriting. I've seen that box before, but surprisingly I can't remember ever opening it. 

You can guess what comes next! My feet were going numb in my weird squatting position, we were going to be late for dinner, and I cracked open the lid. Inside were birthday cards, letters, photos. A silly poem in rhyming couplets I wrote for him on Valentine's Day in 2003. I didn't go through it all, but most of what I found was from his twenties, perhaps because we communicated more often in those days on pieces of paper. 

There was a postcard dated March 6, 1998 addressed to Mike in Brooklyn, three weeks after we first got together and sent from Spain, where I was for spring break. And there was a postcard from the island of St. John, where my mother had taken my sister and me for a week-long graduation gift (we graduated from high school and college in 1998). I described some of the things we were seeing and doing, and ended it with this postscript: 

I've been thinking, we shouldn't honeymoon here. Too hot. Maybe in our flabby forties, when the kids are at camp. 

After I read that, I put everything back, closed the lid, and pushed the box back onto its dusty shelf.

I wrote those words when I was twenty years old, three months into my relationship with Mike. Where did I get that kind of ballsy assuredness? We loved fantasies about the future, about being middle aged with kids, about being retired (back to Brooklyn for long walks and cheap afternoon art movies and a tiny apartment!). In our very first romantic walk in the woods, that very first weekend, Mike - who was a year away from even applying to graduate school - told me he couldn't wait to be a professor emeritus. Now that would be living. To be a wise old man, give the occasional lecture, have lots of time for books and contemplation and yes, walks in the woods. He didn't mention the grandchildren gathered round his knees. We hadn't even kissed yet! But they were there, unspoken, part of his picture. 

I came upstairs, told Beatrice to get ready to go to Grandma's, loaded some dishes into the dishwasher. And in my quiet kitchen with the darkness falling outside the windows I was seized with the most painful anguish. The kind that makes you gasp and curl with its impact. March 12th marked six years without Mike, and March 22nd marked twenty-eight without my dad. I feel very attuned to the absence of my husband and my father at this time of year, and sometimes intolerant of the presence of everyone else's.

Beatrice came down and could tell I was off, despite my best efforts to conceal it. What's wrong Mama? she asked in her open, caring way, and because we had had such a connected afternoon together, despite my worries about burdening her with my own grief, I told her about the postcard. 

But I didn't get to have any of my flabby forties with Papa, I said. I hate feeling sorry for myself, but sometimes I do. 

And then I cried. She hugged me tightly, and cried a little too. 

I told her that I don't like being envious of my friends who have their dads to support them and their husbands to go on trips with. I wish those feelings didn't come up at all.

And Beatrice, who is entering a time of adolescent turmoil and growth, looked at me and said Mama, of course you're mad. I see my friends' dads do things with them, play with them, take them places, just be there, and I feel so angry. It makes you really mad! You have to just let it out!

We were in the bathroom together. I looked at her. 

You have to just - scream!

I still had so much twisted up sorrow in my chest and throat and face. And I held her eyes and opened my mouth and let out the strangest noise imaginable. 

We both laughed. Then she let out a big yell. We laughed some more. We tried out some pretty weird vocalizations, agreeing the low register ones felt best.

We ran in the dark, just because, to my mother's house, letting so much dark energy out our feet and our mouths, continuing to yell and make strange angry noises, cracking each other up the whole way there.

Who knows what the neighbors thought. Who cares. Mike and I didn't get our not-so-very-flabby (as it turns out) forties together, but we did get the kids. They weren't here when I wrote that postcard, and now they are! Three exquisite, loving, growing people that I cannot fathom the world without.

We found a hefty volume of the collected novels of Jane Austen on my mother's bookshelf. We read last night until we were both overwhelmingly sleepy, yet just awake enough to groan together over the absurdities of Mr. Collins. Gabriel had already gone to bed, a bit poorer after his game. I fed the cats, put the dog in her crate, locked the doors and turned off the lights. I slid my hand along the cool, smooth bannister that so many unknown people have slid their tired nighttime hands along before me on my way up the stairs, sank under the covers, skipped reading my own book and, exhausted and content, fell right to sleep.