things we're all too young to know

Lately I’ve felt annoyed with Beatrice. This isn't exactly remarkable, I know, because kids are annoying. But Beatrice has many social gifts, and she plays some important roles in our family, and even though she is five years old, Mama-Annoyer normally isn’t one of them. She definitely grates on her siblings at times with her carelessness and quick tears. She has a willfulness that shines hard and bright when it is time to get dressed; the logic of her fashion sensibility is discernible only to her and her adherence to it is completely unbending. She is fixated on sweets in a way that can come off as borderline pathological. She would like to get her way 100% of the time and protests when she doesn’t by draping herself over a chair and whining.

But all of these things seem par for the preschool course, and like I said, her social gifts are such that mini-conflicts that arise around them are typically quickly resolved. For example: when I collapse on her floor, belly up, cushioned by the mat of interlocking brightly colored alphabet letters that I have tried in vain to remove and replace with a more tasteful rug, staring up at the ceiling and groaning about her INSANE INSISTENCE on the SAME DIRTY PAIR OF LEGGINGS with a HOLE in the KNEE, LORD, Beatrice, WHY oh WHY do we do this every morning? We HAVE to find a better way to get dressed!!! Or, more recently, It is 90 DEGREES OUT TODAY and you want to wear a SWEATER and you HATE being hot and when I pick you up you will complain and look at me like it’s MY fault that your cheeks are SO HOT and your head is SO SWEATY but YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WANTS TO DRESS FOR JANUARY IN MAY. 

And while I rant she stands over me in her mint green underwear with pink edging, the cotton little girl kind with a waistband that hits around her belly button and fits like a sweet 1950s bathing suit bottom, a baby Marilyn Monroe with a slight slouch, her shoulder blades poking out like wings behind her and her hair a tangle, flashing her blue eyes sympathetically down at her wreck of a mother on the floor. 

Mama, I know. I hate getting dressed too. It’s okay that they’re dirty. Just let me wear the pants.

Beatrice can be very persuasive, and in these moments she looks and behaves eminently more reasonable that I do. I just have to smile. Or not - sometimes I’m past the point of regaining my balance and continue my lunatic mother routine and say FINE FINE, WEAR THE PANTS and inside-out them and help shove her long feet into each leg, making a mental note of the dirty ragged toenails, tonight I must cut them tonight and also when did she last have a bath? and also is it so bad to have infrequent baths? and then I’m brushing her teeth and she’s dancing in a goofball way while I do and making me smile and making herself laugh with toothpaste foam leaking out the sides of her mouth and by then I’ve already forgotten the moment of unhinged irritation on the floor five minutes ago.

But lately, I have a hard time shaking it off. And she has a hard time refraining from whining. 

I listened to Annette Benning on Fresh Air the other day. She was talking about a clip Terry played from a movie in which she played a single mom raising her teenage son. After he makes a scary mistake, her character grills him, asking him why he did something so dumb. The son turns it back on her, saying well, why are you smoking yourself to death? Why don’t you care that you’re sad and lonely?

She replies something to the effect of you’re not allowed to say that to me.

In the interview Annette Benning laughed and said, that was the best the character could do in that moment. That was simply all she had. Just a tiny shred more than nothing. She was basically parenting on empty.

And that’s how I feel with Bea sometimes. She’ll respond to a request or refusal from me with the beginning of a tantrum or a whine, or some piece of typical illogical pissed off five year old truth, and I’ll just stare back at her blankly.

What do I do now again? What am I supposed to say? Could someone please hand me the script? I seem to have forgotten my lines.

Or worse, I’ll say something that I know is useless. Such as Beatrice, if you can’t stop that right now you’ll have to have a time out upstairs!

Then she stares back at me momentarily, dumbfounded, before the hysterics ramp up even more.

Whoops. Wrong line. 

I’m parenting on empty. I’m texting and emailing and chatting with other parents at drop off and with the grocery store checker and the woman from PPL and the bank teller on empty. I forget my lines all the time. Or I have to think really hard to remember what they are.

How am I…? What does one say in response to that again? Terrible, sad, tired, disoriented, distractible? No, no, no. 

It’s fine. You say I’m fine, thanks. How are you? 

Part of why Beatrice has been hard is that she is the child most attached to me, most dependent on my emotional state to stabilize her own. We’re really in this together. It’s that old tiresome thing - when things in your life are really hard, and you need your kids to step up and just be good please, they fall apart. Your stress eats away at their own sense of balance, but they can't tell you that. Instead they miss the toilet, or cry wildly because they can't have a toy in line at the store, or refuse to put on their shoes, or pick a fight with you about your appalling arrival time at school.

Two nights ago, I was with Beatrice on the floor of my bedroom for her bedtime routine. She's taken to leaping from my bed onto her mattress which is situated on the floor below, then clambering up the side of my bed and doing it again, and again, while I sing songs and say prayers.

This bothers me. It can't possibly prepare a child for restful sleep. When it's time to count to ten in French while stroking her forehead (don't ask how this step in the routine developed) and adminstering three "sprinkle dusties" I insist she get under the covers. I say things like it's time to relax your body, and she says things like well I can't.

Fair enough. We do our best. Then I stay with her for a few moments. This started immediately after Mike died, when she felt afraid to fall asleep. I would sit with her, holding her hands and murmuring various mantras of my own devising about being safe and loved until she fell asleep. Now this time in our routine has no soporific effect at all; Beatrice just braces herself throughout the quiet moments for when I will get up to leave, at which point she clings to me and begs for another hug.

So. This night I got onto her toddler-sized mattress and wrapped my arms around her and waited to relax, and let go of the irritation, which indeed thankfully happened. I felt her body relax too. I felt quiet and sleepy and so in rushed thoughts of my husband. Mike, Mike, this girl of ours! Mike, how will we get through this without you? Mike, I'm worried I'm messing them up. Oh Mike. 

Suddenly Beatrice pulled her head back and looked at me, hard. 

Mama. You're going to start crying.

I guess I am. How did you know?

You started breathing like this - and she demonstrated a pattern of inhales and breath holding. 

The girl knows before I do.

I guess you're right, Bea. I was about to cry. I'm just thinking about your Papa.

I know.

*          *          *          *          *

About a year ago someone stole the antenna off our car. For some reason I feel incapable of doing anything about it. The radio comes in very crackly and is often impossible to listen to. Normally when I drive I turn to the soothing sounds of NPR, and that habit is so deep that I have learned to tolerate quite a bit of crackle in order to maintain it. So much crackle that if you asked me, at times I couldn't even tell you what show I was listening to. I just keep hoping the reception will miraculously improve.

But when I was in Annapolis cleaning out our house, I found a big box of CDs and pulled a few out to take home with me. One was the 69 Love Songs box set, and I loaded all three into the car stereo. So now instead of crackle I listen to Stephen Merritt sing love songs in the car. 

And all of them - at least the ones he sings - are for me. And Mike. In the spirit of:

I should have forgotten you long ago
but you're in every song I know

It could be a memory of hearing the song with Mike, or the sentiment, or the humor. It feels like Mr. Merritt is in the car with me, offering various stylized ways to express my sorrow in his marvelous bass voice.

Why would I stop loving you 

a hundred years from now?

It's only time. 

Marry me. 

It made me think about the night Mike and I were lying in bed, talking about the possibility of my remarrying. I don't want to, I said, because I already have a husband. And Mike said but when I die, you won't anymore.

It was utterly shocking. Why would his death alter the fact that he's my husband? But then we both remembered the words we said to each other. Until we are parted by death. When one of you dies, the marriage ends. How bizarre. How impossible.

So I drive around and cry. I remember a Magentic Fields show in New York in summer with Mike. I ordered a bloody mary and the bartender made a joke about it not being breakfast time. I asked him to please make it spicy and told him he should try one right now, at night, because it was delicious. We heard Stephen Merritt sing Book of Love accapella, and the room felt very still and dark, and I leaned lightly against Mike's shoulder and chest just behind me, and could feel he was less moved than I. No matter; it felt good to be in that time and place together.  

My minivan failed inspection this morning. I'd like to ignore the busted rear brake pads. I'd like to drive around in a failed car, parenting on empty, crying, listening to Papa was a Rodeo over and over with the kittens mewing along in the backseat and the children begging me to turn this weird music off already while we head off into the blazing sunset.

Well. I'll probably fix the brake pads. But the rest will happen this summer. By August they might be singing along. 

outside in it

When a shirt or pair of pants intended for wear is stubbornly "inside-outted," my children will bring it to me, asking if I would please outside in it for them. I've outside-inned more items than I could count over the past twelve years. Frances must have coined the phrase as a toddler, then Gabriel picked it up, and now Beatrice uses it exclusively, as the other children do their own outside-inning these days.

I've looked, and there are precious fews pictures of me and Mike together. Most of the time one of us was the photographer, and Mike wasn't big on the selfie. So there you have it. Not a lot of outside-in views. I took the above picture last winter. It was a relatively better time health-wise, and Mike had promised the kids he could make it to the sledding hill. But once we got there, the wind was terrible, and he was just so sensitive to the cold. He didn't feel well; we both knew it was a bad idea. So we documented our arrival on that freezing hill as proof - you see, Papa did come! - and then Mike quickly went home to warm up under the covers.

I've always held that being on the inside of a relationship can be ulimately lonely, because no one besides the two of you can really know what it is. If you and your partner are alienated from one another, it can seem that there is no one in the whole world with whom you can connect about your struggles. No one can really understand; no one but him.

I rarely talked about Mike. He was a private person; it seemed a distasteful betrayal to talk about him, good or bad, in his absence. Besides, it didn't appeal because it would be utterly futile. How could I communicate one piece of what we are, who we are, and expect anyone else to really get it, without access to the entirety of the thing? Any effort to explain or share about him, and me, and us, seemed pointless.

There are a tiny handful of friends who love and know us both well with whom, during Mike's years of illness, I would sometimes talk. They are people who supported us both unconditionally, knew our flaws, and could empathize with me without making an object of Mike. So that felt safe. I needed to push at those privacy boundaries sometimes; Mike simply wasn't able to talk through things with me in the same way and we were beset by the hardship imposed on us by his rare illness. But even in those moments, I worried. I might vent in the midst of sadness and anger, but my friend won't know about the goodness that followed. She will carry around the wrong idea. She will think our lives are always that messed up. Ugh.

It's as if I thought we were in a spaceship. And that every couple is in their own unknowable spaceship. And we fly around together and notice each other, comment on shine and shape and speed, and sometimes one member of the crew will step out and complain about the other's predilection for dim interior lighting whereas she prefers it bright, but you can never have a clue about the truly important stuff that goes on in there.

But something interesting has happened since Mike died. People send me cards, and sometimes they share memories. They share their impressions formed outside the ship. Much of the comments about Mike are comforting to read, and consistent with what we all knew about him: his kindness, his humor, his sensitivity and intelligence. How he was "staggeringly handsome," a phrase that someone from Swarthmore who knew Mike and lived in the same dorm during their freshman year used to describe him in a card she wrote me and that I continue to treasure. Exactly. Simply beautiful, up until the moment he died, with his clear eyes and delicate, perfect cheekbones and jaw, his boyish face. When he taught at St. John's, he was often mistaken for a student. Sometimes I found that irritating (why do you get to be so damn youthful and good-looking, while the man at the wine store takes one look at the dark circles beneath my eyes and knows I'm buying this wine to console myself with after the children are in bed?) but mostly I felt proud of my staggeringly handsome husband.

Sometimes, more rarely, people share memories of us. And this is a very great and nearly always surprising gift to me. A friend remembers seeing us walk hand in hand on Main Street in Annapolis. (Us? Hand in hand? Mike, who was so boundaried physically and rarely showed affection in public?). She said she was shocked when I once shared with her that we were fighting because we just didn't seem like the kind of couple who fought. Another remembers how delighted I was to see him when I walked in a room and found him there, how I lit up in smiles, how visible was our love for each other, just in the way we looked at one another. Another wrote about how everyone could see how deeply Mike loved me.

Really? He did? You could? Are you guys just saying all this to comfort a devastated widow? Could it really be true? Could you see us - and could you see things about us that we were too mired in everyday life to notice ourselves? Life is so full, sometimes overwhelmingly so. In our old pre-cancer  Annapolis lives we had little ones and school and work and always so much to do: water in the basement, visitors coming next weekend, a babysitter who just backed out, laundry piled on the couch. It was all trees most of the time. Did other people who stood beyond the treeline see a more beautiful and majestic forest?

I wrote earlier how I had to realize that I wasn't trusting Mike enough to tell him when I was hurt or upset; I wasn't trusting him to love me no matter what. I think I often struggled with that; with not trusting his love for me. His own challenges, before and during his illness, sometimes made it hard for him to express it. But I learned, and know now, that it was always strong and true. Still. It's an old habit, a part of me that doesn't quite know how to release it's hold on that scratching doubt. So when people tell me something I already know - that Mike loved me, that they could see it, that it was real - that fearful doubting part of me sighs and sags in relief, saying, oh thank you, thank you, thank you. Say it again. Let it be true.

My mind goes back to the hours before and moments during Mike's death all the time. Every day, many times a day. When we knew he was dying, that there was no way around the fact that soon he would not be able to breath, he looked at me. A moment. His eyes, so very beautiful, so very him. He gave me a little wave that felt unbearable - that was how he acknowledged that we both knew this was our goodbye. He typed on the iPad: you know how much I love you.

He knew about that small sad part of me and he knew it was getting tinier with each passing moment. I told him I did. And that he knew how much I loved him. It was the truth.

But how extraordinary, that I keep on learning about us, in this time of sorrow and weight. I like to hear about us from the outside in. It affirms all the yearnings of my heart. Let it be truer and truer still.

I persist in tree mode with Mike. Each significant moment - Frances's choir concert, the arrival of our two new kittens, a terrible conflict with one of the kids - is an opportunity to miss him afresh. To feel the strangeness of his absence, and to anticipate his response to the situation. And the thing is, a good sandwich is a significant moment. So is a beautiful flowering tree, or learning last night that our old Annapolis contractor is caring for his wife who has a rare brain cancer, or going to the New School art show and watching various kids we know perform, or finding ants in the kitchen. Again. Oh Mike, can you believe these stupid ants?

If you pay attention, what moment in your day isn't significant? And so he is with me, and not with me, all the time. It's sadder than I can properly say.

It's also disorienting. Sometimes I feel that I don't even know what I like, or what I do, or what I think, without him to hold onto or push back against. The kittens? I know I wanted them. Mike would say I have enough on my plate right now, feel a little protective of me in this state, suggest I slow things down, not take on new responsibilities quite yet. I'd say well, they are a lot of work, but we are so sad and they bring us joy. And then he'd say, okay Meagan. And give me a hug, still thinking it was a little crazy. And be sad with me.

I'm the one who overextends; he's the one who withdraws. I'm the one who loves to cook and eat; he's the one who's more ascetic. I'm sloppy, he's neat. I have the worst sense of time, he arrives three minutes early. What to do when you no longer have your one to understand yourself in relationship to? Am I actually the way we thought I was? Can I keep our family intact without Mike's complementary and balancing influence? Even when he was so sick and I was doing everything, which was for quite a long time, I still could hear him upstairs in bed thinking it was past Bea's bedtime, and that helped me to get a move on. Now he's not there quietly noticing - or not noticing - my lax parenting on display and I can't get anyone to go to bed. In fact everyone is sleeping in my room and chronically tired. Our room. Mike was so good at bedtime routines and consistency, at keeping the kids in their own beds! I used to boast that was the only thing we were really great at as parents. But now I know Mike was great at it, not me. I just followed his lead.

When you tell me what we were like, and what I was like, and what our family is like, it's a sturdy handhold for me. Even if it's about the past, the distant past - like Mike being a staggeringly handsome eighteen year old. It validates and secures my slippery reality. It helps me understand where I came from, which surely must help me tolerate the uncertainty of my path going forward.

We do love each other? We did endure with faithfulness and love through a terrible time? Our kids are alright? They won't resent me indefinitely? They do know how Mike treasured them? We did take good care of him?

Our marriage was real and true and loving and good? I loved him well?


Oh, my friends. Keep outside inning this, please.

my life in books

I've often commented to friends that the only things I really missed from our packed-up house in Annapolis were the books. Books, and the beautiful L-shaped couch, our one and only truly adult purchase: a midcentury modern, marvelously firm, clothed in softly textured yellow fabric we chose from a box of alluring samples, sustainably made in America. exactly-the-way-I-wanted-it piece of furniture. A sturdy and expanisive object that could support all five members of our family flung lavishly across it at the very same time, books in hand. 

When I traveled to Annapolis on Tuesday morning, sitting in the cab of a big truck loaned to us by a sweet family at our kids' school and driven by our heroic friend Teb, I thought about how the couch wouldn't fit in the truck with everything else. And how we should leave it in the house for staging purposes anyway. That was okay; I'm not sure I'm ready to see the couch back in our daily lives again without Mike stretched out on it, reading. 

Then I thought about the books. So many books. There were boxes that friends had already packed from Mike's office at St. John's waiting in the garage. And shelves and shelves of them in the basement. Every time Mike and I moved over the course of our twenties, which was often, there unfolded an inevitable moment midway through in which we'd look at each other, sweating and staggering beneath yet another heavy box of books on the way to or from the truck, and wonder aloud: why do we have all these books again? Should we leave them all on the curb? Does it make sense to cart all these pieces of paper around with us from one apartment to the next?

We got rid of some of them. Sometimes. But most we couldn't part with.

So many friends met us at the house in Annapolis. They were waiting good-naturedly when we arrived with donuts and boxes and packing tape, ready to do the hard work of sorting and packing up our house to prepare it for sale. I hugged them all one by one in greeting, feeling my heart sink and trying my best to steel my buckle-prone spine in order to face the jumbled contents of the garage. There were coffee makers, dishes, Mike's bike, dressers, chairs, garden tools, the dress up box, random jars and baskets - all the stuff of a house that had been stopped midflow. When we had packed it all up in the summer of 2015, we thought that we'd be back in a year to resume use of these items - laundry soap, parchment paper, crafting feathers, swirled homemade crayons that Frances and Gabriel's babysitter had poured into madeleine molds, nestled in a red cardboard box. 

That was hard. We sorted it all in the driveway under a cloudy sky - this pile is trash, this pile is to be donated, this pile goes to the truck. It's violet and dandelion season in Annapolis. The cherry tree was its old blooming pink garish self, drooping overhead. My friends held my hands, they laughed with me over the odd bits and pieces all thrown together, a beaded necklace, a dirty potholder, a chipped vase. A lot went into their trunks, Goodwill-bound. 

It was only when I descended to the basement to go through the books that my heart began hurting too much, the spine-buckling commenced in earnest; it became hard to lift a box or respond to a simple request after that.

I had missed the children's books in particular, mostly because Beatrice was just two years old when we left and now she is five, and so many books occured to me that I wanted to read aloud to her in those intervening years. 

But I hadn't realized how our books tell our story. A quick glance at all those spines serves as an anchor to my own history: tiny tethers to the mysteries of time and space and relationship. I don't often reread, so I didn't miss the books for their contents. But in being reunited with them, I felt how each represents a moment in my life, and nearly all of those moments were somehow shared with Mike. 

There was Possession. I read it on a trip with Mike to Santa Fe in our early twenties, sitting in the bright afternoon sun outside our friends' home that they had generously loaned to us while he journaled or read a book about Buddhist-informed counseling. He had just finished the masters degree in his program and was already feeling skeptical about academia and continental philosophy; he was wondering about other career paths. We talked about it in a charming New Mexican coffee shop, and on an exhilarating hike that led us past a sweeping green caldera. On the trail we met a Native American drum maker who explained he had a special license to hunt there for skins to make his sacred drums. He offered us a look at a herd of gazelles through his binoculars. 

There was Shtetl, a book that I bought in a fit of luxurious expenditure just weeks after graduating from Swarthmore, feeling the thrill of setting my own intellectual agenda for the first time in ages, free from the social pressures of my sophisticated theory-besotted classmates. I wanted to read a book about the long lost world of the European Jewish shtetl. So I did. In our tiny one bedroom Brooklyn apartment, at the tender ages of twenty-one and twenty-three, Mike and I talked about the joy of reading exactly what you wanted to read - not for a class, not for an agenda, not for coolness, not to be able to reference it casually in certain company - but just because it was good.

I found the hardback copy of Austerlitz and held it up to Robert, who was dutifully hauling his tenth load of things up from the lower basement. You've read this one? 

Yep.

I didn't like it! It was so ... cold. But I think I was supposed to like it. It was supposed to be so good.

Robert said it was cold, and that he did like it. Also that it was much better in German. Then he kept hauling things, and I went back to standing there, rooted to the peeling linoleum in front of the washing machine, touching page after page. 

I brought that book home from Fresh Air. There were always books and CDs being given away, sent by eager publicists. Mike and I both read it eventually, and both felt sort of flat about it. Meh. I put it in the giveaway box. Even though it was a tiny part of our story, I gave it away. 

Each and every book had a story. So it was hard to part with any of them, though I certainly did - a lot of them. Children's books that I had read hundreds of times, favorites for a month or so, that I never really liked. But they had traveled with us, they had been a part of our lives. 

There were at least seven biographies of St. Francis, from a time when Mike felt particularly captivated by his story. I tried to remember the ones he had liked, and saved two. There were my dad's paperback copies of all the JD Salinger books that I adored - and did, in fact, reread many times over my adolescence and early adulthood - with yellow crumbling pages and that marvelous rotting paper smell. There were Mike's gardening books about native plants and organic vegetable gardening with pages marked and notes in the margins. There were stacks of Chesterton and CS Lewis, so important to Mike during his time of reconversion to the church when Frances was tiny, and all the beloved Virginia Woolf which made me flash to the debate we had about Septimus in our big bed in our first house in Lancaster, and Mike's suspicion that she was glorifying his suicide, which struck him as off-putting and perverse, and my defense  - she inhabited his battered mind so generously, so fully; writing him was an act of love that somehow excused it.

I found many, many journals. It would never occur to me to open one of them when Mike was alive, though he kept them in shared places, like living room bookshelves. I understood them to be mainly intellectual journals in which he would work out things like dissertation and lecture ideas, preferably in a pleasant caffeine-enhanced state of focus and flow, esconced in a quiet cafe corner. But on Tuesday I opened them all, desperate to hear his voice, desperate for him to talk to me. They were indeed personal, and searching. Mike's intellectual passions were so connected to his spiritual yearnings and psychological particularities; what did I expect? One journal from early 2002 described how irrationally angry he was at me, and how he knew it was rooted in his depression, and how he wasn't ready yet to seek help for his depression, and how terrible that was to endure. A couple of pages later he described the ways I helped him shake off that heaviness and anger for the afternoon, and how he loved me, and how he wanted to marry me. How he would marry me. 

Then I couldn't bear another page, and had to leave the basement for awhile.

There was a book of verse about Oxfordshire I had found in a used bookstore and given to Mike for his fortieth birthday, in preparation for our planned trip to England that never happened. There were so many Beverly Cleary books. There were the chunky board books that Mike read to all our babies. Peek a who? Peek a YOU!!

Nowadays I have these encounters with people that I don't know, and they are excruciating. At the dentist, the hygienist walked me back to the exam room, cheerfully asking over her shoulder how I've been.

my husband died my husband died

Oh...okay I guess. How are you?

On Monday, I took Frances out for some special just-the-two-of-us-time. We went to have our nails done. The gruff woman who did my pedicure picked up one of my feet and began slapping the sole of it roughly with the back of her hand. She squeezed the arch, digging in her thumbs while she looked out the window, and it hurt. My husband died! I wanted to yell at her. My husband died. How could you touch me with so little tenderness?

I think about him all the time. His having been here, and not being here now, is what frames all of my moments. The sorrow only grows heavier. Those books in the basement helped me know more deeply than ever that indeed, yes, I have lost the most important person; the person I grew into myself with; the person I trusted to love and love me; the person I could rage at one minute, and embrace the next; the person whose opinion I valued most; the person I wanted to make babies with; the person whose soul shined even in the darkest days; the person I once sat across the table from night after night, talking about what we were reading.

This morning at breakfast Beatrice mentioned the "Bob" books, simple rhyming books she reads at school. Gabriel remembered some of the first graders using them in his classroom last year. The two of them were laughing, listing all the silly titles they could remember. Gabriel suddenly paused, about to pour the milk into his cereal bowl, looking ponderous.

You know, Bob Has a Job is my personal favorite.

Something about the wry tone, the little sparkle in his eye, made me gasp. 

What a Mike thing to say; what a Mike way to be. 

landing gear

I went to yoga a couple of weeks ago, and towards the end of class wonderful Tracey the teacher invited us to choose a hip-opening pose that we were prepared to spend a few minutes in. I picked pigeon. Just the right pose for me: a tolerable amount of torment destined to tease apart all the hardened sorrow stored in my long-suffering hips. About a minute into the first side, she exhorted us not to neglect to give our "third eye a landing place," be it a block, the floor, or our hands. 

She didn't need to tell me. I was already face-down, rolling the smooth space between my eyebrows along the tendons and knuckles of my right hand which was resting on top of my left, back and forth, back and forth. I wasn't just landing my third eye, I was sliding it slowly but surely down into the earth - beneath my hands, beneath the floor of the studio, beneath the foundation of the building. 

In case yoga is a foreign language, or the third eye talk already has you rolling your first and second eyes simultaneously heavenward, I'll try to explain: settling into a hip opening pose is submitting to sustained, heightened sensation. It's a willing walk along the edge of what one can tolerate without quite heading into pain; it definitely involves discomfort. It's easy to forget to breath, to mistrust one's ability to sink a little deeper into the tightness and resistance without something essential snapping. But you can, and over time - if you remember to breathe - you do. 

But man, is it hard to dwell on the lip of hurting without the reassuring solidity of the floor, or wall, or any other strong and reliable surface. The persistent sensations can make you feel as if you are flailing about, even if you're perfectly still. Having something to rest upon, or push off of, as the case may be, gives one a sense of safety in the midst of all the intense feeling.

It reminds me of giving birth. With each kid, during the final pushing I favored a position on my side, gripping Mike or a midwife or whatever I could get my hands on. During Beatrice's birth I remember my top leg swinging into space, unmoored, futilely searching for solid ground up there in the air above my body. I couldn't become sufficiently calm and centered to focus on the business of pushing our baby out and trusting that I wouldn't split in two until the student midwife finally figured out (why couldn't I just ask? the words wouldn't form) that I absolutely needed her to grip the sole of my wandering foot and push back. Solidity, safety. Exhale. Then I could do it.

Now I move through my days looking for places to land. My third eye has rested on so many surfaces: the rough cross at church on Good Friday, the many strong shoulders and arms of friends, the floor at home, the floor of my office (the safest position of all, where I find myself when the grief is overpowering, is an extra ball-like child's pose, armed tucked underneath my shoulders, head pressing into the ground), the back of our firm yellow couch when I went to Annapolis on Tuesday to meet with a realtor and begin the process of sorting and packing up all the things that were frozen in time about three days before Mike's diagnosis, in 2015. The chain of the swings in the old backyard, the side of a kitchen cabinet, my open palms.

On Monday, before I went to Annapolis, I went to the Social Security office. I'd been putting it off. How I longed to put my forehead down on the shiny faux wood surface of worker's desk, reminiscent of terrible office furniture in the various non-profits of my past and visible beneath all the documentation I had brought, while she clacked away at her keyboard, expressionless. I had waited two hours for the pleasure of this interview.

Every so often she'd look up. Was he a veteran?

I would think. Was he? No. No, he wasn't. 

Four minutes of clacking ensued. I watched the reflection of the overhead fluorescent lighting's move on the surface of her desk as I moved my head ever so slightly this way and that, like a child playing with the sensory world. I looked down at Mike's death certificate resting lightly on the left side of the open manila folder I had brought it in, and our marriage certificate resting on the right. The children's birth certificates were tucked beneath that. There was my life, rendered strangely impersonal and official on these pieces of paper, and I sat on a black plastic chair looking at it and listening to a woman from the Dominican Republic being interviewed in Spanish for Social Security Disability benefits behind the partition to my right. I'm sure she was looking down at her own stack of transcendently joyful and grief-laden life events, all reduced to dates and names typed on yellowing paper. 

Railroad worker? Federal employee?

What? 

Um...No. No.

She nodded. More typing, more long minutes. My mind went back to the moments before Mike's death, as it often does, and I longed so desperately to be able to squeeze his hand, to look over at him sitting next to me and make mutually sympathetic eye contact - isn't this the worst? - or to find him waiting in the car so I could tell him later what a drag all of this is. 

Did he die in Lancaster County?

Think, Meagan. 

Yes.

Couldn't I just land my third eye for a brief moment? Just until the next question? I was entering the pain zone, past the edge of a hip opener, and all I needed was to anchor my increasingly unhinged body and soul against something solid in order to endure it. 

My dad always said never put your head on the bar. By the time he was advising me (probably around age seven, maybe when I dropped a sleepy head on a restaurant table) he was a long-sober alcoholic. Meagan, they'll kick you out the minute you put your head on the bar.  

Maybe it was a general warning from one person to another, both of whom knew that the other knew just how good it can feel to settle your forehead on a cool smooth surface, especially when life is getting you down. It's a comfort, but the world doesn't always look kindly on that kind of thing. So in the end I tucked my legs up tight like a chilly bird on a branch in the snow (how many times did Mike's doctor at Penn comment on how I looked like I was about to take flight, perched on the edge of the extra exam room chair during those long visits?) and wrapped my arms around my knees and somehow made it through. Now they will send us benefits for the children. I'm grateful. 

In writing this, I realize that more than anything I am longing for the very best place to touch down, which is Mike's body. Yes, there is comfort in landing my flail-prone limbs and heavy head somewhere steady when I am so full of hurt and sadness that I'm afraid the doors will all fall off their hinges with a crash. I find containment for this sorrow in a hug, a wall, an open car door. The hinges are, miraculously, functional. But I think when my third eye is seeking contact, I am really seeking Mike. His warm shoulder, his elegant jaw, refuges for me in the hardest of times, even when he could barely tolerate my touch because he was in pain and the sight of him had to suffice. I held his hand often during the days and hours leading up to his death; he was holding mine too.

My beloved. It has been a month. How terrible it is to be without him.