o happy faults

O truly necessary sin of Adam, destroyed completely by the Death of Christ!

O happy fault that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!

I think about Mike all the time. I want to talk about him, tell about him, as do countless others who love him. Part of me worries that we will turn him into a tidier package than he was, a shining, simplified Mike-in-death who is somehow easier than my real, complicated, handsome, challenging, brilliant, sensitive, searching husband – a man who was many things, but never easy.

We went through times of great struggle in our relationship. We had young children, I was trying to balance our home life and my work, Mike had an endlessly demanding career at the college. It’s not easy raising a family. But it wasn’t just the usual pressures on us, it was us – Mike and me, in all our particularity, running up against a pattern of falling into alienation that took time and passion and commitment to work through each time we hit that wall. We would reconcile and come back together, until life would carry us along and tensions would build all over again.

Mike suffered periods of depression and would sometimes become more withdrawn and irritable, working too much; I would grow resentful and silent and take on too much of the child-raising and home-sustaining work. I longed for him to reach out to me with affection during those times of emotional and role-related distance. Often he didn’t. But neither did I. Eventually I’d get so angry that I couldn’t hold it in, and I’d overreact to a seemingly insignificant offense. We’d talk, and sometimes fight, and stay up too late, and eventually melt and forgive and get in bed and talk with open hearts, clearing the way – until it happened again.

I remember one of the worst times, when we were struggling to come back together again and it just wasn’t working. We were avoiding eye contact and hanging onto anger for at least twenty-four hours – much, much too long. I could barely function out in the world, carrying the wrongness of this separation from Mike around with me. Everything I did was colored by the pain of it. It was a Saturday afternoon. I was in line at Whole Foods with one of the kids. I felt my phone vibrate in my back pocket, took it out, and read Mike’s text: I can’t stand this any longer, it hurts too much. Please. I love you. Forgive me.

Or something like that. It was years ago. I do remember the phrase “I can’t stand this,” and how it articulated exactly what I was feeling: I too cannot stand this for another moment. I literally can barely stand up in this interminable line; the cart is the only thing between me and the scuffed linoleum floor. I cried and cried, right there in the line, and raced home to him.

It was only after Mike got sick, and we’d been through a couple of months of treatment, that I had a profound realization: I was not a passive victim in our relationship. I had sometimes chosen to see myself that way in the past, when Mike was depressed or overworked and withdrawn. But I was responsible for myself in our marriage, and when I chose resentment in silence, I was shirking my responsibility. I had been avoiding it because I was scared. Scared, I think, that Mike didn’t love me completely, and if I were to speak up when hurt or ask for more – if I were to claim full partnership – well, I might lose him. But the fear and insecurity were mine, about my own weird combination of temperament and a socialized commitment to niceness and conflict avoidance. When I stewed in silence, I wasn’t trusting Mike. I wasn’t trusting us.

Resting in private anger was cowardly, and not allowing our marriage to grow and stretch as it should. I felt shocked by this realization. I hadn’t been brave enough to be fully present. I hadn’t trusted Mike’s capacity to receive my feelings and stay connected. What an earth-shattering idea: I was withdrawn too. I wasn’t allowing my beloved in. We talked about it. I apologized. I began to see with new eyes, and felt a restless urgency about taking up my responsibility and being honest with him, as honest as I could.

Mike’s illness brought this to the fore for me because our time together was no longer something to take for granted. Not that I ever did, not really. My dad’s death from cancer at forty-four taught me that. But Mike’s disease and those early treatments made it so real: the situation brought my love for him into relief, and the glaring awareness that there was no time to fuck around – no time for dishonesty, mistrust, or alienation. I wanted to clear those things away, to be together completely. Not that I always accomplished it – old habits die hard – but I do think our marriage changed for the better. I’m grateful for that.

O happy fault. I’m sure Mike introduced me to the phrase many years ago, probably when he first began to read Thomas Aquinas seriously, though reading back over Mike’s two precious blog posts yesterday was a reminder of how fully he engaged his faith and love and intellect in an effort to understand how God can will terrible things. How evil and cancer and suffering can be part of God’s intention. O happy fault! proclaims that God brings ultimate good from evil; salvific faith from harrowing suffering. A sin can be necessary in order to bring about something far greater. This line is part of the Easter Vigil service, one of Mike’s (and Frances’s) very favorite liturgical moments of the year.

We didn’t go to the Vigil this year. Too late for my underslept five year old. Easter Sunday with its triumph and lilies and insistent joy was a draining endeavor for me, despite good friends visiting and holding me and the children up throughout the day. I simply felt exhausted, empty, and sad.

Though it isn’t exactly the same gesture, the same narrative, I associate O happy fault now with another shift that opened up for me in the last months and weeks of Mike’s life. This change in my heart was heightened during the two weeks he spent in the hospital before he died. All of our past struggles no longer pained me because I understood that they were the necessary sins of our greater love; because Mike was Mike, in all his brilliance and particularity and irreducible Mike-ness, and because I was me, we had to have those struggles. It was all part of our path, and thus precious.

I love the whole glorious person of Mike, and his vulnerabilities and challenges and past experiences are intimately tied up with his strengths, his faith, his soulful presence. Mike wouldn’t be Mike without the shadow side of his sensitivity, intelligence, empathy, love. I realized with surprise and gratitude that I held tenderly to the painful moments of our relationship alongside the joyful and romantic and transcendent ones. It no longer hurt to consider the hard times. We had to have them all, because we were us. Being us was a treasure.

I fell in love with Mike when I was twenty years old. We shared the rocky passage from late adolescence into adulthood. We had to find our way together, growing up, struggling with how to honor ourselves and each other and our love and God. That isn’t easy for any two people to do.

O happy faults – Mike’s faults, my faults, our fumbling mistakes, our failures to take up our responsibility to one another – because without them, we wouldn’t be us. We wouldn’t have grown into accepting and loving each other more deeply, as we did. Aeschylus says “wisdom comes alone through suffering.” We had to suffer to grow in wisdom.

Both before and after Mike’s illness I would often note how incredible it was that I could nurse hurt feelings and hang onto anger all day long, avoiding him as best I could, but as soon as we looked each other in the eye and spoke a few honest words – words that had to have love anchoring them, if they were indeed honest – it all melted away. It was almost annoying, how hard it was to stay mad at Mike. It was affirming too. No matter how messed up things were, it was all rooted in love and thus suffused with hope.

Loving him, I told Mike, wasn’t really up to me. It wasn’t something I willed. It just was. It was an insistent force, and even when I would have wished to turn it off, or at least turn down the intensity so that I could stay mad or separate in some way, I simply couldn’t.

So I don’t want to lose our faults. I don’t want to smooth over the difficulties, the sadness, the annoyance. I don’t want to edit the stories. I cherish all of it.

In the ICU one day Mike mouthed something that I didn’t understand. He wanted me to pass him the tissues or something simple like that, but I was and am a miserable lip reader. I apologized and passed him the iPad, asking him to type it for me. He refused, violently gesturing forget it with obvious irritation.

Be patient with me Mike, I said. Don’t treat me like that. This is hard for me too.

He looked at me, so depleted, and now upset with himself for being short. Which I could barely stand, adding to his burdens like that, though I had promised him – and myself – that I would be honest with him about my feelings even in those terrible times. I had to. I couldn’t bear any chasms, even small ones, to grow between us.

Are you angry with me about anything? I asked.

I thought he might cry. No, he said. You’re perfect. And then: I hate how intimacy erodes courtesy. I have always struggled with that.

Before Mike’s tracheostomy, I sat with him in the pre-op area, holding his hand and crying and saying goodbye to his perfect elegant throat. We both cried during those long quiet waiting minutes, on the cusp of a procedure that dramatically marked the transition from treatment to palliative care.

In the past, during our hardest moments, Mike had articulated a fear that he wasn’t the husband I deserved. That perhaps I wished for someone, or something, better. Suddenly, as we were waiting, I had to make sure he knew that that never was and never could be the case. So I told him, sitting in the plastic chair pulled up as close as it could be to the gurney, wedged between the IV pole and the nurse’s rolling computer, that he was the best husband in the world for me. I loved every part of him. I loved his whole being. I wanted for nothing. There is nowhere in the world I would rather have been than right there, at his side, holding his hand, sharing that grief.

I knew that was true, true as true as true. And so did he. The pains of our past had all slid away in those days, though I had not forgotten them. They were now simply part of who we were. Mike could drive me crazy. He could escape into a book of theology or philosophy and disappear for hours. He could make me laugh harder than anyone, he could never resist correcting my grammar, he could recite hip hop lyrics with surprising imitative skill, he could melt me with the graze of his hand on my shoulder. He loved and sought after God with a singlemindedness that I sometimes found exasperating, though it was the part of him that called to me most powerfully, and shaped so much of our great love.

He was the best husband in the world for me, and he died.

It hurts so much.

underwater life

A few years ago we spent a week along the peaceful shore of the bay in Lewes, Delaware with some of Mike's family. Soon after we arrived, we met a family on the quiet beach who explained to us with a hushed sense of delight that if you submerged your ears under the water at that very moment, you could hear dolphins calling to one another in their otherwordly language. 

It was true. You could hear them, quite distinctly. I would often float on my back, squinting up at the hot pale sky, and let my heavy head slip deeper under the surface to listen for the dolphins that week. They - and the water, such a mysterious and effective conductor of sound - didn't disappoint. 

Lately I've been taking baths before I go to bed. I like the water to be as hot as I can stand. It's been very hard for me to sleep, and something about being almost intolerably hot before I get under the covers helps. Last night I flipped onto my belly and rested my cheek against the cool white slope of the tub, and my ear slipped into the bath. Suddenly I could hear the weird sound the house's HVAC system makes. I could hear my own stomach doing something strange and disturbing with my last meal. I could hear a neighbor's footsteps on the other side of the wall. Everything changes under water; it's louder, echoing. Sound acquires a kind of weight.

My days, and nights, bring such moments of elemental shift – the feeling of going underwater, going underground. I haven't spent this many days away from Mike since the day I saw him walk into the Olde Club at Swarthmore on February 13, 1998, leaving a conversation mid-sentence to get a closer look at him, so handsome and elegant and confident in his trim black pea coat. Three days later we kissed in the Crum Woods. Three days before that Neutral Milk Hotel had released our favorite album of all time. (A test of our absurd consuming early passion: we skipped their show - happening a seven minute walk away - because we couldn't bring ourselves to get out of my bed. We shared head-shaking, eye-rolling, laughing regret at that dumb-love decision in later years.)

Four days later he went back to Brooklyn. Seven days later I was dropped off in lower Manhattan by a friend and called him from a pay phone. Three weeks later I followed through on previously planned week-long trip to Spain (after desperately and rudely trying to get out of it, so dismayed by the thought of an ocean being between us) and Mike met me at the airport upon my return with a bunch of yellow tulips in hand. We rode the train back to his apartment and talked about philosophy graduate school, and possibly going for a masters in Cambridge first, and maybe he or maybe we could live in England for a year? I remember that talk vividly, standing in the subway, hanging onto the overhead bar not so much for help with the swaying train, but rather to prevent my knees from buckling under the waves of intense emotion, sparkling visions of possible futures before my eyes, Mike in my favorite black and gray sweater, holding those bright flowers, because it was all infused with a thrill - are you really here with me? Are we on a train hurtling through New York? Are we talking about tying our futures up together so soon? Is this even real?

I have thought and thought, and I am sure we never spent more than a week apart. We rarely spent more than a day or two apart.  

Now it's been seventeen days, and death - so much more terrible and silent than an ocean - is what separates us.

And I do the things I have to do, and even things I want to do. I pick up the kids at school, and make dinner, and go to yoga class, and invite friends over, and watch a crazy Spanish TV show with Frances, and sing to Beatrice, and think about what to get Gabriel for his birthday. But in the midst of all of it, many times a day, I go under. And everything is louder and stranger, and my memories and thoughts of Mike are more vivid and embodied and overwhelming. My sorrow crushes me. And then I cry and cry, and don't know how to stand up in this strange other-element. Sometimes it lasts for just one or two minutes.

Everything I do leads me back to him, in part because many of the things I am doing were impossible to do when he was in the hospital during those two weeks before he died, and nearly impossible during the weeks and months before that. 

Almost immediately after Mike died, people started coming. They brought flowers (against the rules for so long in our post-transplant house). They didn't wash their hands when they came inside (ditto). Many, many children were here, making noise and bouncing balls off the walls, and I didn't have to tell them to stop because Mike was resting. Everything changed. I had to remind myself over and over: it's okay. The dog can come in. The plants can come in. I can put the five pumps of hand sanitizer by the front door away. 

Our house now has the open door that it used to, before Mike got sick, and any kid who wants to can come over without having to be hushed and goaded into hand washing or turned away for having a runny nose. We can host a birthday party. We can plan a trip. We can play a rowdy game. But all of these regular life things that we have been missing for so long have been returned to us at an unfathomable, heartbreaking price, and because of this any pleasure I take in them is freighted with bonebreaking sadness.

In the first few days, I felt that I was inside of Mike's body. I couldn't eat, I couldn't sleep, I could barely breathe, and everything hurt. I felt the muscles of my face compose themselves in a Mike mask, the expression and stillness he acquired when in pain. When I had to pee, I would consider how difficult it would be to stand for many minutes beforehand, reluctant to try, just like Mike would in the hospital, looking at me and sighing - I guess I'll have to do this again, somehow. I would encourage him and be light and practical about the work of unplugging the monitors and finding the urinal and moving the pillows and helping him swing his legs over the side of the bed and trying not to flinch when he flinched from pain. I wanted to be calm and present for him in those moments. With him gone, I felt his pain and the heroic will it took to accomplish this basic and essential task.

Everything was blurred and heavy and disorienting when he died. I had been living so very attuned to his needs, especially during those two weeks in the hospital, that in the hours and days after his death part of me slid into his hurting frame. I was porous, without firm edges. 

That gradually subsided. Two or three days ago I noticed that my body was letting go of its unwillingness to participate fully in maintaining my existence. I have begun to sleep a little more, to feel hunger and to eat more regularly without my stomach hurting every time, and to breathe more fully, without the constricting forces of anxiety and pain posing a challenge. The physical disregulation was very terrible, but it’s ebbing away is also very terrible, another layer of loss. 

Oh Michael. I don’t want to lose that deep identification with your hurting and beloved body. But Mike. The kids. And me. We have to endure this sorrow, and we have to live.

Last night I brought Gabriel and Beatrice to the Spooky Nook sports complex for the big county Science Fair awards ceremony. Frances had brought her project on silk worms and was sitting with her other middle school friends who also had projects in the fair. We settled in with our dear friends. It was interminable. We sat in gray folding plastic chairs in a huge concrete bunker with many other parents and teachers and students who were paying much better attention. The sound system was abysmal and it was hard to hear anyone clearly at the microphone. There were endless awards. Beatrice was playing and being adorable. Gabriel was folding airplanes with the program and leaning on my shoulder. I felt fine. Then my eyes rested on the back of an elderly man’s head. His jawline was very defined and seemed to cut into his neck, just under the ear on the left side a little too much. His skin was wrinkled and brown, his hair white and thinning and tuft-like. He probably had a head and neck cancer, I thought. They probably cut something out of that spot, right there under his ear.

But he lived. And now he is sitting in this awful room supporting his teenaged grandchildren at the county science fair. Or maybe they are his great-grandchildren. He’s enjoying this.

And that’s all it took to send me back into the elemental grief world of heightened sensation and feeling, and I could feel my cheek sliding along Mike’s beautifully defined jaw, delicate yet strong, to plant a kiss right at the base of his neck, which is something I often did – to conclude a hug, to share some tenderness, to try to magically love the cancer out of him in that exact, beloved, familiar spot.

I couldn’t stop crying. Beatrice and Gabriel worked hard to distract me and bring me back to the world of the science bunker, the droning voice at the microphone listing winners, the increasing silliness in our row that was growing as a form of protest. So it didn’t last. Three minutes, tops. 

Once I told a friend that the experience of reading To The Lighthouse, one of my very favorite books, was like being underwater. I just remembered that. It really is. Virginia Woolf's grief was a powerful thing. I am planning on spending a lot of time this summer in clear, cold rivers and lakes with my children and our friends. I'm going to take this sorrow and submerge it--to honor it, and to let it move through me, flowing out into the world and back in again.    

my bloody valentine

Children look to their parents to provide a sturdy frame for their experience; a story in which to fit the strangeness and incomprehensibility of the world they cast their keen, curious eyes upon. Before she's gotten used to her baby being out of diapers, a new parent finds she is called upon to explain the mysteries of the universe with surprising regularity.

It just happens. One morning while you are warming up your cold coffee for the second time, your budding preschooler, as yet unable to successfully start the peel on his clementine, begins relentlessly interrogating you about the nature of the afterlife. What to say? Death is a big one, and it's so early. You're caught off guard. How do you take the enormous scary true thing he is asking you about and somehow give it back to him in a narrative that both honors the mystery and illuminates some truth and allows him to fall asleep that night?

Kids have a nose for the not-nice. They're wise to our efforts to soften the blow; they dislike euphemism and evasion. They want to know about death, birth, God, and every big metaphysical question you can dream up having to do with time, space, loss, and love. They encounter human-scale conundrums and demand help making sense of them, things like homelessness, divorce, where babies come from, the practice of raising and slaughtering animals for food, war, bad things happening to good people, and good things happening to bad people. I try to always be honest, and to avoid freaking them out too much. But the vaguer you are in the face of their questions, the worse everything gets.

I remember making dinner and listening to NPR in our new home in Annapolis on the anniversary of 9/11 in 2008. Frances was just three years old, and Gabriel was a little baby whacking a wooden spoon against a white kitchen cabinet door at my feet. I was rushing to chop vegetables and start cooking while he and his sister were happily engaged in what they were doing; who knew how long it would last. Frances was playing kitchen a few feet away. The radio was on quietly. A reporter used the phrase "when the twin towers fell" and Frances suddenly looked up at me, alarmed. 

What towers?

Some towers that used to be in New York City.

They fell down?

Yes. 

Why did they fall down?

A plane flew into them. 

Why did a plane fly into them? Was it an accident??

Um. Um. No, it wasn't an accident. It happened a few years ago. 

Will a plane fly into our house? Do planes fly into buildings in Annapolis? 

Her face was filled with terror. Now no building was safe. No plane was safe, either. This line of questioning continued, and my brief and uncertain responses probably only fueled the terror. Maybe if I had said something like "a man who wanted to hurt our country decided to fly a plane into those buildings, and no one had ever done that before, and no one has done it to a tall building in our country since then, and people in America remember the anniversary when it happened and feel sad" - you know, given her some context and a little help up front with this new "twin towers fell" reality she was confronting - maybe then she wouldn't have looked skywards, cringing, and ran for her life across the cobblestone streets when we visited Philadelphia a year later, convinced the big buildings would fall and crush us. 

It never occured to me before now that her fear of the tall buildings on that trip and my inability to give her a frame for what she heard on the radio that day might have been related. 

At least I learned that she listened to the news when I listened to the news. So I didn't listen to the news around her very much after that.

As if I could stem the tide of those conversations! 

Now Frances is a beautiful budding teenager, and she knows everything. She reads everything, she notices everything. Our joke is that I live under a rock and depend upon her to tell me about what's happening out in the big world. But even so she still looks to me and Mike for orientation; for help with the value and meaning of things. How to frame them. 

Soon after she first got her period, about a year ago, she asked me - the person in our family most likely to know - a very real question: what could possibly be good about this? My kids all knew about menstruation. How could they not? They followed me into the bathroom as soon as they could walk. Beatrice still does. (She recently told me she doesn't want to have a period. Ever. Sorry, kiddo.)

But knowing about it and experiencing it yourself are two very different things. Frances wasn't interested in having babies for a very long time, so the whole fertility angle wasn't very compelling to her. She'd now have to worry about stained sheets and underwear, and she'd already lived through awful cramps and unruly emotions. It was clearly burdensome, this so-called passage into womanhood. Why are you happy about this, Mama? What kind of a lunatic would celebrate the onset of grappling with a real drag every month for endless years to come?

I think because Frances is so damn smart, and has been training me for many years now, I surprised myself with a pretty good answer to her question.

Having our period - having our body refuse to get with the program and support our illusion of invincibility for a few days every month - helps us to know from a young age that the world is not ours to control. Boys are not given the same opportunity. Our periods teach us adaptability, resilience, humility, stamina, acceptance. We learn that being a healthy growing person includes a time of vulnerability and limitation and discomfort every single month, and in the end, that is our strength. Whether or not we ever have a baby, we realize our capability, our endurance.

We don't need to rail against our weakness, or the world's refusal to bend to our will, or feel shame at our embodied limitations, as men so often do. We take a breath, take an Advil, have a snuggle with the hot water bottle, and move on. 

We are powerful because we know our vulnerability in a way that men can't. 

And maybe there is even more there for us that is good. I told her how once I was practicing yoga with a friend who was a serious student of Aryuvedic philosophy and practice, and when I went into a deep twist, she showed me a gentler variation, explaining she preferred it as she was "on a ladies' vacation." Huh? A what? I finally got it: she was on her period, and thus giving herself a vacation. Going gentle, taking it slow. 

Frances, what if our periods are not irritations that get in the way of our fast pace, but rather invitations to slow down, to give ourselves a mini vacation, knowing it is merited and good? 

What if last night, instead of making dinner for my family and cutting valentines for Bea and making sure Gabriel practiced the piano and overseeing Frances cooking tofu between 5 and 6 pm, all while muscling through some awful cramps and changing my super plus tampon not once but twice, I just stretched out on the couch, explaining to the children that Mama was on a ladies' vacation, and they could make themselves peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for dinner? And make one for me while they're at it? And let's get really crazy and have a picnic on the floor in the living room so I can lie down??

I know, I know, it might not work so well. But maybe if I did it with some regularity it would. What if we owned this magical thing that happens in our bodies, rather than conceal and deny and quietly grumble over it? Frances, maybe becoming a woman really is something extraordinary - even if it is a real pain in the ass sometimes.  

It bonds you to women everywhere. It separates you from children. It provides a slew of stories that will, I promise, be funny someday. That little box of Advil I gave you is a badge of honor. You can take care of yourself; you can endure.

Writing this while living through the worst time of the month for me is an interesting test. I’m gushing like a gunshot victim, my lower back is killing me, my emotional balance is slightly more delicate than usual. I’m seriously annoyed by the timing of this extra-heavy period, arriving on the heels of the flu. I mean, come on. Give a girl a break.

But it occurs to me - you don't have to like a thing to recognize its power and place in your life. You don't have to enjoy it to be marked by it.

In a culture that tells us that our bodies - especially female bodies - are objects to which we should do things like sculpt and tone and pluck and smooth and otherwise manage and subjugate to our will, having a period is like hosting a messy counter-cultural rebellion in your pants every month. My body is, in fact, a most essential part of me. And I am a subject, and I would rather not be treated otherwise - by myself or anyone else. Just when I start to slide into considering my body as an object, I start inconveniently bleeding. It's a built-in system to remind me to honor and respect my body, rather than turn it into a perpetually disappointing object covered in splotchy skin and thinning, graying hair.

I think that's why I loved pregnancy and childbirth and breastfeeding. It just wasn't up to me. Things happened - outrageous, dramatic, very messy things - and all I could do was marvel, gag, endure, behold, exclaim, and try, usually futilely, to wrap my mind around the power of it all.

I didn't say all this to Frances that day. I said some of it. I wouldn't have thought of any of it, without her there to ask. Tell me why this is good. I'm saying it to her now. Frances, it's very, very good. I am grateful to you, the miracle who arrived after hundreds of bloody undergarments were rinsed in the sink, for helping me to consider the mysteries of the universe in a new light over and over again. I love you, dear valentine.

winter sycamore

A lot has happened since last I blogged: Advent. Christmas. The children's break from school. A long break from work for me. And most incredibly, Mike was hospitalized for most of December in Philadelphia, where he had a stem cell transplant. I am guessing many of you also read the Caring Bridge page we maintain so I won't bore you with the details - again -  but needless to say, it was a hard few weeks, including many awful days in the ICU.  

Then Mike came home, and there was so much to learn: new dietary rules, housekeeping rules (we had to move the Christmas tree outside before he returned home; so much bacteria clinging to those spiny needles), how to administer IV meds through his picc line, how to arrange medical supply delivery through the home health care company (still can't work their damn app), how to adapt our space to best enable Mike to cope with his symptoms and vulnerabilities.

We are still learning. A lot.

Some days I feel as if I am running from the moment I wake up until the moment I crash. The dishes, the food prep, the sanitizing! But the hardest thing for me - as ever with all this cancer crapola -  has been the emotional work. The holding of so many feelings. It's challenging, no matter what: making a safe space for all the rage and frustration and joy and fear that one's kids feel while they do the work of growing up.

But now? Now it sometimes seems nearly impossible to tolerate and hold and respond to so many feelings all the time. The system is saturated. Mine, theirs, the family-wide one. I have to honor the emotional worlds of my children and my husband, so I won't go into details.

But sometimes I want to scream. Or cry. Or walk out of the house and sit on the curb for awhile. (I have done all of these things. Today I played a game with Beatrice and Gabriel in which we took turns roaring like a bear. Man, did I enjoy that - a little too much maybe - might have freaked them out.)

This ever-shifting emotional work is like living in a little house that is being battered and blown about in a storm. The rain pours in torrents, and there is an old, leaky roof. I hear a drip of water hitting the wood flooring in the living room, and reach out a bowl to catch it. As soon as the drop splashes into the ceramic curve, I hear another drip across the room, and quickly grab a coffee mug to set underneath it. Then I hear a tiny splash on the tile in the kitchen, and run to slide a bucket into place. One drip turns into a trickle, and the other drips seems to respond and flow faster too. 

I really don't want my house to break. I don't want the floors to buckle and the walls to become damp and moldy. I have to deal with all the leaks so that we'll stay dry and safe.

And yeah, I get that running around in a way that often seems futile, trying to catch everyone else's drips, may be ill-conceived. It surely wears me out. A deluge will probably knock out a wall any day now anyway. Plus, shouldn't I let them catch their own drips? Shouldn't they be responsible for their own feelings, and I'll be responsible for mine?

Well. That sounds nice and healthy and all, but I'm not very good at it under the best of circumstances. And they're children. They need help with their feelings. And he's my husband, and he has cancer. And they're my children, whose father has cancer and just came home battered and bald after a month in the hospital. And he's my husband, who knows his children are coping with his illness. And that's really, really hard. And they all have to live in a house together in which those realities are part of every moment. So I don't know what else to do.

I listen to everyone as best I can. I try to get them to communicate directly. I don't let them vent about each other to me. I forbid the children to call each other shaming names (and then flip out when they do anyway). I worry. I hug them all the time.

I always did that. Twelve a day!

But also? I cry more readily than ever. I burned the banana bread. I forget the allo dietary rules constantly. I drop things. I feel desperate when cooped up with my family all day long, as I have been more than once lately because of the bitter cold. And I see that the children can barely stand it either, and rage or cry if they can't see their friends. Who live elsewhere. Because seriously? Our house is tense.

Exercise helps. Friends help. But perhaps the most reliable source of stability and calm during these full-to-the-brim days of physical and emotional labor has been the view out of the third floor window on my way to wake up the children for school.

If my phone is in my pocket, sometimes I take a picture. It's crazy beautiful. I want to really see it, and tuck it away, and look at it again, and remember the feeling of seeing it. Which I never do. But I still like to photograph the view of the sun coming up and filling the sky, coloring each day a new strange and brilliant world.

Last Thursday I went to work for the first time in weeks. It was great to be back in my office, and to see my wonderful colleagues, but the best part was the walk home.

It was bitterly cold, and hardly anyone was outside. I left the building and began walking briskly, lost in my thoughts, noticing a sense of dread about returning home and the upset I might find there, knowing they would be waiting for me to come and somehow fix it (the unfixable!), and feeling ashamed about dreading the normally happy return from work, and then - and then - some angel wing quietly slid past my left cheek, encouraging me to look right and up, and there was the sycamore tree.

I stopped. It was illuminated on one side, the sun-facing surfaces of its silvery white branches aglow in the setting winter sun. The sky was opalescent and diffused with soft light and moving with every whispery color a nine degree January sunset can muster: pale green and orange and yellow and pink and blue. The clouds were brighter bits of pink and orange. A flock of birds swooped haphazardly and yet uniformly past the sycamore, black and distinct on a celestial field.

And there was that tree right in the middle of it! It said, Meagan, look at me. Look at me in my created silver splendor, my winter glory. Look at the sky. Just look.

I put all the cracked mugs and bowls I'd been carrying down, filled with my beloved family's feelings, right there in the snow. I felt the sharp bitter cold in my nostrils. I began walking again, and listened to the snow squeaking in rhythm, compacted under my boots with every step. I watched the light move long and pale along the red brick buildings. I turned back to see the tree, now in shadow, and I felt my heart become unencumbered. I felt it bare and reaching, like so many shining branches.

I smiled. I was ready to greet them now.

A couple of hours later I fell apart, trying to do too many things at once, but that's okay. It didn't detract from the peace that the sycamore gave me. Here in our little city, between concrete and brick, the natural world still calls me, reminding me of the steady ground I stand on. I'm supposed to be here, breathing this cold air, beholding an otherworldly tree, feeling a soft cheek nestled in my neck. The house might flood, and I may not be able to do much about it.

Even so. It is all of it so very, very good.