broken and breathing

One morning, some years ago, I woke up with a terrible pinch beneath my right shoulder blade; a weird nerve pain that flared hot whenever I turned my head. Moving like a robot and wincing every so often, I somehow managed to drop baby Beatrice at her sitter's and little Gabriel at the bus stop and make it on time to a staff meeting at work. I was sitting very still in a chair waiting for everyone to assemble, grateful to not have to move, when Bernadette, one of the other therapists at the student counseling service, asked what was wrong. I looked like I was holding my breath, she said.

Well, I guess I am, I explained. When I take a deep breath I can feel this awful pinched nerve in my back.

She was a psychiatric nurse and a practitioner of something called Healing Touch, and asked if she could help. Why not? So before the meeting got started, she spent a minute or two with her palms quietly placed on my shoulder blade.

Meagan, she said. When something hurts, it needs our attention. You need to breathe into this pain for it to resolve. Stop holding it. Breathe.

So I did. It hurt at first, and then, miraculously, it began to calm and relax. By the end of the day, I was moving just fine.

This past week has been hard. I've been managing the rocky sale of our old house, and collecting paperwork needed for the purchase of our new house - something that, among other things, required me to battle over many phone calls and many mixed messages with the bank holding our old mortgage, and eventually concede defeat, hire a lawyer, and submit paperwork at the county courthouse to become the official executrix of Mike's estate in order to fax them evidence that I am indeed she, and it is permissible to verify that I have been paying off a mortgage originally drawn up in Mike's name only. It wasn't so much the headache and expense of this task that I had hoped to avoid; it was the anguish of having to present his death certificate and will and brute reality of his death to impersonal clerks in a courthouse office. In the same room where three couples were waiting to process marriage licenses. Anguish isn't too strong a word. I started crying and couldn't stop, standing there at the brown formica countertop with my manila file of papers verifying that my husband was dead and trying to focus on writing out a check for $183.50 to cover the cost of creating something called a letter of administration. Then I went back to work to make my 2 pm appointment.

The next day, Saturday, I had a list of things I wanted to get done after Gabriel's soccer game: chores, packing, fixing the trail-a-bike so Beatrice and I could commute in the fresh fall air, groceries, phone calls. But the bike shop had attached the trail-a-bike to the wrong bike and the piece connecting it to the seat was full of shims I couldn't manage to pry out. I popped Bea in the car and ran back to have them fix it. I ran home. I realized that the old base of the baby seat was still on my bike, blocking the way to the hitch. I went through all the allen wrenches in the tool box. None fit the screws. I took a deep breath. Beatrice had been waiting all week for me to do this one thing. I called Teb. Could I come over and borrow some tools?

So Beatrice and I walked to Teb and Diana's. Annika and her friend Willow had planned a crafting afternoon with six other ten and eleven year old friends, and they were just trickling in, gathering around a table covered with tassels and embroidery thread and hot glue guns. Normally, this would be  a dreamy sight. But I felt intrusive, and burdensome, and the weight of the day - and the week, and the month, and the year - began to push inside me, all the way up to my eyeballs, and I knew I would cry.

Sheesh. What a time for it.

But Teb, emerging from the basement with a case of many allen wrenchs in his hands, saw me and sat me down right there in the middle of all the brewing fun and gave me his full attention. He squatted down next to me on his bum knee and let me cry and tell him about the pain of having to become the executrix of Mike's estate. The girls didn't seem to notice, or if they did they chose to ignore it. And after Teb had sat with me in that distress and grief, he suggested Beatrice stay for the big girl crafting, and that I do whatever I wanted to do, all by myself.

So I went on a long run, and went to the grocery store, and decided that was enough productivity for one day, and felt better.

Later Libby came over with her boys who had been playing with Gabriel. While all the kids played she sat with me at my kitchen table and listened as I shared various worries about my children - the things that bounce around in my mind, and rarely get articulated. The things I used to talk through with Mike. I felt that loss so keenly, noticing how I had so much to talk about, and so I cried some more, and she stayed with me. With her peaceful and loving presence she let me know it was perfectly fine to do so.

I was thinking about those moments yesterday morning while the children still slept and I gradually decided not to cajole and insist and fight them into going to our still-unknown and scary new church but rather use this Sunday for less emotionally demanding pursuits. In the quiet I was reading a Henri Nouwen book, Life of the Beloved, that a group of women from our old church and I decided to read together back in July. (Better late than never. We'll get to talking about it eventually.)

Still, my own pain in life has taught me that the first step to healing is not a step away from the pain, but a step towards it. When brokenness is, in fact, just as intimate a part of our being as our chosenness and our blessedness, we have to dare to overcome our fear and become familiar with it. Yes, we have to find the courage to embrace our own brokenness, to make our most feared enemy into a friend, and to claim it as an intimate companion. ... My own experience with anguish has been that facing it and living it through is the way to healing. But I cannot do that on my own. I need someone to keep me standing in it, to assure me that there is peace beyond anguish, life beyond death, and love beyond fear. 

The experience of grief can so often mimic depression; we bereaved feel a temptation to hide our suffering away - to cry in the shower, to wall it over with socially acceptable behaviors and gestures that do not, that cannot, come from our broken hearts but rather stem from an act of self-protective will. Play it cool until you can get home, get under the covers, all alone, that's where it's safe to suffer. And the sorrow of loss is, on the one hand, something one must endure - befriend - alone. In so many ways, it is a path that only I can walk.

But befriending one's brokenness (and aren't we all, in our own ways, in our own unique pain, called to move in this direction?) is a gesture I make while leaning on many loving arms. Left to my own devices, my pain would just turn in and in and in, and I would run to escape its unbearable weight, and that never ends well.

It is my community of friends and family that allows me to inhabit my pain. To breathe.

I told Teb, through tears, that I didn't want to go to court and file to become the executrix of Mike's estate because I didn't want Mike to not be alive anymore. I didn't want this. It hurts that I have this.

And he said, I know.

He didn't flinch, and he didn't offer me a drink or a snack, and he didn't say oh yes, but now you can finally move forward with this thing, it'll be fine you'll see, and he didn't say, oh look those girls could use my help with their beads, hold that thought, I'm off for another pair of needle nose pliers! Rather he kept me standing in it.

I wrote about our Coloradan river trip not too long ago, and how I wanted to find the courage to keep seeking out canyons. Now I see how my strong and loving friends, who are themselves not afraid of my pain, and even willing to be close enough to me to touch it and help hold it, to feel it with me, open up such sacred spaces all the time. In the momentary quiet of my kitchen, in the midst of a crafting party, in a busy cafe, on the front porch, their arms make sturdy mini-canyons in which my knees can buckle and my heart feel its brokenness all over again.

Nouwen also says I realize there is a mysterious link between our brokenness and our ability to give to each other. He writes of how our truest joy comes in the giving of ourselves to others - something we can only do when we have befriended our own pain. He likes food metaphors. Bread can only be given once it is broken. A meal is a time of vulnerability, of communion. One of my favorite cookbooks by Marion Cunningham includes a charming list of rules for breakfast. One of them (which I can't quote exactly, as I've already packed it) is to be polite, be kind, because everyone is defenseless at the breakfast table. I think that's true of all tables where we gather to give and receive and enjoy and look each other in the eyes. We're defenseless. That's why I love mealtimes. (And why resentful, angry dining companions are the stuff of excellent theatre and nightmare Thanksgiving memories).

Feeding and being fed seem to call forth something essential and joyful for me. That must be why I insisted on showing Libby a new cookbook my friend Sarah sent me just moments after my tears had slowed. I want to make you this, and this, and this. I want to give you a beautiful salad; I want to give you myself.

I pray that someday I can know, deep in my heart and bones and muscles, that I already had given myself to her, just as she had given herself to me. For those with the capacity and willingness to receive it, sharing our brokeness is a gift. A blessing. A deepening ripple of love moving outwards to touch countless others.


World without end.

bitter widow alert

I got into the car after yoga class this morning and caught a minute or two of the news at the top of the hour. Just breaking? The Matsumotos of Japan have been confirmed as the world's oldest living spouses. They've been married for eighty years. When asked the secret to her long marriage, Mrs. Matsumoto replied: patience. 

I rolled my eyes. No, Korva, I said aloud, steering my busted minivan down Mulberry Street in the already blazing heat. The secret is not dying.

As a therapist who has worked in campus counseling centers with students for years, and as the widow of a college professor, many colleagues and friends and I have often sighed together over what sometimes seems the squandered abundance of those fleeting college years. Youth is wasted on the young, we say, shaking our heads. If they only knew how lucky, how beautiful, how smart, how energetic, how funny, how capable, how young they were, young people would enjoy so much more about being nineteen.

But maybe sometimes, also, age is wasted on the old.

Once, in the thick of a very terrifying time with Mike's cancer, I was in the Y locker room and overheard two elderly women talking as they changed after using the pool. They were complaining of how long it took them to do anything, how going for a swim took up nearly the entire morning, all because of how old and slow they were. How irritating it was that their bodies protested and rebelled. How effortful it was to put on a bathing suit!

I resent it, said one. I do. And the other said, me too. And I stared at them, and thought to myself: get the fuck out. You get to be eighty years old. You get to be here. How can you resent your body that you have been blessed to live inside of all these years? Those arms that have hugged your loved ones, those legs that have carried you over thousands of miles, this form that propels you through water and then sits on a dripping locker room bench alongside your friend twice a week?

I have always hated upbeat celebrations of long marriages, of being ninety years old, of sitting at the same desk for forty years. Maybe the Matsumotos haven't talked to each other since their children went off to college. Maybe they were real assholes to their neighbhors. Maybe all they did was not die, and decline to divorce. Inertia is a real thing. It's usually easier to stay than to go. And if you keep doing the same thing long enough, and don't die, eventually you get a real big party.

But what about my mom, who has loved my dad since she was eighteen? Who would undoudtedly be married to him today, if cancer hadn't taken him from us when he was young and vital? Where's her party for being married and then widowed to the same man for forty-two years? Isn't her love also an act of endurance, of patience, of beauty? What's her secret?

And what would I give for eighty years with Mike! What a blessing that would be, to live and grow and age and die together, as the Matsumotos have and will do. I wouldn't decline to divorce Mike; I would keep working towards an ideal of loving him as he was, and allowing him to love me as I am. I would fight to stay connected to the twisting, tightening, loosening, chafing, supporting, powerful bond between us until I was one hundred and four years old.

Life isn't something that happens to you, my dad told me and my sister one day when he was in the hospital. It's something you work at. He wanted us to know that after he had died, when he couldn't be there to remind us not to opt for inertia and passivity, and not to blame external circumstances for our hesitation to choose the right thing. He wanted us both to take responsibility for our own life, to work at it and make it good.

When we ask Mrs. Matsumoto what's your secret what we really mean is tell us what to do so we won't die. Tell us what to do so we can live with someone we love who also won't die for eighty years, too. That question comes from our collective delusion; we like to think that we're in charge.

But it's not up to us. Not really. Not even very much at all. That's why it's annoying to celebrate longevity for longevity's sake as if it were an accomplishment. It suggests those that didn't live so long didn't try as hard, or as well. They fell short of the goal of mastering and managing their own lives. They didn't eat enough superfoods, or meditate for ten minutes daily, or write a list of everything they're grateful for each night, or walk 10,000 steps before bed, or hug their children enough.

It's cool that Mrs. Matsumoto is 100 years old, and still married to her husband, who is 108 years old. It's very cool. What might I say to her, instead of what's your secret? I might say: what great good fortune you have had, to be given so many years in which to become your self and live out a full life, and to be given so many years to to learn and grow and love together with your husband! What a beautiful gift you have been given - not a reward for being good, but an unearned, precious blessing. A very good gift. Tell us what that's like.

It is the spirit with which we accept our gifts that seems worth celebrating. I know that Mike graciously accepted his, with God's help, in a spirit of humility and love and gratitude before he died.

His life wasn't long. His life was extraordinary.

force of nature

About a month ago I was knee-deep in a cold brook with Beatrice. I had suggested midway through our week in Vermont that she take a bath as the fairies probably do, in a little magical waist-high pool below a large mossy stone. She was delighted, and threw off her dirty dress. Beatrice is nearly always quick to take advantage of opportunities to undress. When our friend Wesley, age six, came down the path from the meadow to join us, Bea asked if he wanted to take his clothes off and have a fairy bath too.

No thanks.

Instead Wesley suggested we build a dam a little ways downstream, so we picked our way over the slippery river stones and looked for more to pile up in a narrow passage of the brook to try and divert the water. It was a hushed, exactly-right kind of interlude, sheltered as we were by the green, branching trees overhead and the gentle ferns and steady rocks along the banks. I tried to ignore the part of my mind that was questioning the endeavor, bracing itself every time one of the children hoisted a very heavy stone and slid on his or her way to the dam, imagining crushed toes and tears and a perilous journey back up the hill for adult help. I just couldn't bare to stop their work. The energy was so peaceful and focused. Beatrice and Wesley, miniature collaborative engineers bent over piles of rocks, seemed even more lovable than usual.

When it was time to return to the meadow, we all stepped back to take a look at our work. The water was very determined, and though we had not stopped it, we had at least changed the way it was flowing around the stones, creating a new ripple. Look at that, I said. No matter how many stones we pile up, do you see how the water always finds a way?

Beatrice, resplendent and naked, stood looking down at the stones in the brook.

Just like Papa's cancer, she said.

How did she know that? All I could say was you're right, Beatrice. It is.

And it's just like grief, which surely also always finds a way. We traveled to Colorado this month, and the majority of our second and final week there was spent on the Green River with a group of extraordinary people. Wesley's papa Zac invited us to come on the trip the night of Mike's funeral. We were sitting side by side on the floor of my mother's dining room. After the hardest week imaginable together, I was bracing myself for his family's departure. He asked me with his characteristic calm and conviction. It seemed like a good idea, and I said yes. I didn't worry too much about it. I bought plane tickets, and told the children to trust me, they would love it.

As the trip approached, our anxiety started to mount. I drove myself crazy in the days before - packing up, preparing the house for our absence, setting up kitten care, plotting the air travel and car rental - so crazy that I in fact forgot many items I had purchased especially for the trip. I cried when I realized I'd left four sun hats at home. How many times had Zac said: don't worry too much about the other stuff; the only really important thing you need is a sun hat? But I did get my family onto the plane and through the Denver airport - before I realized all I'd forgotten -  and that alone made me feel like a superhero.

The first week in Colorado, spent in the company of supportive, trusted friends, was full of gentle adventures and comfortable social time in new, beautful places. The kids were happy, and thus increasingly opposed to the idea of driving into the middle of nowhere, getting into boats they did not know how to operate that would navigate through unknown rapids, joining a group of people that they'd never met before and who themselves were lifelong friends, and spending all our time with these stranger-Coloradans - depending on them - over five solid days in the most remote wilderness they'd ever experienced. The last leg of our journey to the river was over a hot, endless dirt road. As we bumped along through clouds of dust all three children begged me to turn around, to please reconsider, to not force them into a situation that would not, in fact, be good for them at all but would rather be a nightmare.

I kept my calm and reassured and teased and smiled in the rear view mirror but of course I too was thinking that I had been insane to agree to this. We would be a burden, we would be outsiders, we would be clueless, we would embarrass Zac and Edith. The children would fall apart and I would have to take care of them on very little sleep in a public way before so many tough, capable Colorado families. I would feel like that much more of a parenting failure.

But. I did not turn around. We made it. It was hot. Everyone else on the trip was also arriving, and they hugged and joked and began doing things in preparation for the trip that I didn't understand. I started crying about ten minutes after we arrived. I introduced myself to half the people on the trip (there were 23 total) while crying. We were camping at the place where we would put-in the next day, and I couldn't find anything in the dusty trunk: not tooth brushes, not water bottles, not a flashlight. It was getting dark.

I was so tired. I was tired of driving, of defending the rightness of this questionable journey, of meeting new people and having to remember how to behave like a more stable human than I in fact am. I had not been sleeping much the week prior. I had gotten sick the day before and began running a fever in the middle of the Alamosa Walmart while I looked for last minute supplies. Every new place we landed in brought on a fresh wave of tears (and this was true for every trip of the summer - every arrival, every greeting, every first hug was like flipping a grief switch - and come to think of it, an insomnia switch - for me). And now, this silent canyon, this wide river, these strangers in a strange environment? I was utterly overwhelmed.

The next day we got ready and settled onto the well-laden boats. I kept on crying, and not sleeping, and feeling periodic waves of pain because my husband was not there with us. If he had been alive, we would never have come. Even if he had been alive and healthy we would never have done it. He would have been the most vociferous and articulate anxiety-riddled naysayer on that endless dirt road. We would never have been invited. We were in that extraordinary place because Mike died, and that made it hurt too.

And I cried because I was scared. The river trip was like one last transitional adventure before the next chapter of our lives began, the time in which I am a widow, and my three children's father has died, and we press on and go about daily life without him. The time of his illness has past; the time of immediate heartache and disorientation is ebbing away, the family and friends are returning to their routines and so, presumably, are we - whatever those are. Now I am steering this ship alone, charged with creating some kind of life that is good and full for my children, despite our collective sorrow. How will I do it? I sat looking up at those ancient canyon walls thinking, I'm afraid. I'm lost. I'm sad beyond measure. I don't know if I can do this. Mike. Mike, how can I do this?

And sometimes I cried without thought, without reason, helpless before a tidal wave of feeling. The sleeplessness fed my deterioration, but the grief-pain seemed to keep me up at night. It was like being in the grip of a storm system.

Don't get me wrong; I also had calmer moments, and time to laugh, to talk to new, caring, and brave people who didn't flinch around my pain, to delight in the wild water battles on the river, to savor wonderful, well-planned meals, to sit, to read to Beatrice at night, to watch the stars (lots of time for sleepless star-gazing), to listen to the song of the canyon wren, to watch my kids get to know the other kids on the trip, to admire the skillfulness and strength of everyone around me, to swim and wade and be in the rushing river.

But by the fourth day, the fatigue and the feelings had left me a hollow wreck. I felt ill. At the lunch table, when asked to pass the mayo, I cried in response while fumbling for the wrong condiment and couldn't even speak. I was, in that moment, desperate and unable to think how I could make it through another day. So I was directed to a hammock, and fed, and cared for, and rocked and caressed like the tiny baby that I am, that is part of me, for a very long time. A wise and gentle woman on the trip mothered me and helped me to see that almost immediately after Mike died I had had to start dealing - preparing our house for sale, making arrangements, submitting death certificates, going back to work, caring for the kids, looking for a new house to buy, managing our summer travels, and I had not had a moment to breathe. I had been so busy and then I arrived in this canyon, the most vast and open and quiet space I ever had been, with many people to help care for my children. I had nowhere to be but here and nothing to do but this - and was it any surprise then that the emotional devastation hit me so hard? And could it be any other way? And wasn't I, in fact, brimming with gratitude to be able to feel like this, to be exactly where I should be, experiencing exactly what was mine to experience, with so much beauty and love to support me through it?

She had faith that I wasn't going crazy. I rested in her nurturing presence. I wanted to be there, with her, with the water, with the sky, with all those people whom I'd just met and with the people who had been a part of my heart for many years too.

I didn't sleep much that night either, but the next day I felt scoured out and peaceful. Able to enjoy the long day on the river before take out. Incidentally, I was on a boat that day with Beatrice and Wesley, my dam-builders, as well as Gabriel and Zac. The dream team. Best snacks, best games, best I'm-bored whines, best everything. The wilderrness within had been so harrowing; the wilderness without became more inviting and somehow milder once I had emerged from it.

(It helped that it was gently overcast, after days of blazing sun.)

This terrible grief path has taught me so much that would have been easier not to know. When wrested from your partner, your team-mate, your two-person system, one is forced to contend with herself. There is no one to push off of or agree with; no one to blame, look to, question, compromise with, care for. It's just me in here. Holy shit.

When I left all my duties behind, I discovered what lay beneath them. There is always so much to do; especially during Mike's illness, I felt I could not stop. Then I sometimes resented the ceaseless intensity of my pace. Now I have begun to see the other side - the refuge that doing so much has been, and surely will continue to be. When you aren't busy, the hurt rises and crests at the surface and it is a wild, powerful force.

I have been taking care of everyone else and helping to contain and hold their feelings for many years now. In the thick of cancer I said to friends more than once that there was no room for my own feelings. It was too bad, but I didn't think it could be any other way. Now that I am no longer managing a crisis, I think I have to intentionally make some room. I'm still a therapist parenting three recently bereaved children who is in the middle of selling and buying a house and preparing for the fourth move in four years but I think it is time for me to embrace that the courageous thing for me to do right now is to continue seeking canyons.

It would be so much easier to concern myself with everyone else's feelings and needs. And that's probably mostly what I'll do. Force of habit. But now I know that my own are inside too, waiting for a little space, waiting for me to find the courage to endure them. It's my responsibility to do that; I can't blame circumstance or other people or cancer or my children for making it impossible. It's my own work to do.

down to the river

I was at the eye doctor's earlier today for an appointment, thinking to myself: why can I barely breathe in a medical office? Responding to simple questions takes unexpected amounts of effort. Just staying put in a chair is so damn hard. After Mike died I started taking care of things I'd neglected during his illness, like teeth cleanings and annual exams, so I've been in quite a few waiting rooms lately. It's always an emotional challenge.

As soon as I registered that thought - why does sitting here feel like torture? - some other part of my brain replied duh Meagan. Doctor's offices are the site of your family trauma. They are the places where you had to digest countless pieces of bad news, or good news that turned bad within days, or simply sit next to Mike in miserable silence. There's nothing mysterious about having to remind yourself to breathe at the eye doctor's, even if nothing particularly scary is at stake.

I wonder how many hours we spent together with our attention focused on an exam room door, waiting for the doctor to finally come in? How many hours did we spend in obedient silence while a doctor swiveled away from us on his chair, clacking on a keyboard, pondering a screen? (Whoever would have guessed the extent to which the adoption of electronic medical records would dehumanize and, I think, re-paternalize the doctor-patient relationship? One is expected to sit quietly, not unlike a child at the dinner table who can only speak when spoken to, while the provider faces away from you, clicking and typing away indefinitely, occasionally asking a question about symptoms without actually making eye contact (let alone body contact). What can staring at a screen have to do with healing a hurting body? One is not supposed to acknowledge the strangeness of this bizarre social situation; one is supposed to be a good patient and submit to it. Mike would get so angry at me when I would bring up symptoms he thought weren't important, or dwell on something the doctor obviously didn't think mattered. I hated that. But now when I think back, probably some of the question-asking and forcing doctors to spend time on things that perhaps weren't essential was my way of wresting a little power back. Of insisting on making the relationship between Mike and me and our providers into something at least a little collaborative. Of forcing our experience, and Mike's body, into the room with that computer screen. See him. Mike is the only one who knows what's really happening in his body. We live with this terror day and night. See us.)

So anyway. The kids and I recently returned from a meandering trip to visit friends and family in three beautiful, water-rich locales: Massachusetts, the coast of Connecticut, and Rockaway Park in New York City. I was afraid to go. I was afraid of how sad I would be without Mike there with us. I was especially afraid of Madison, CT, where we all were together at the exact same time last year.

That was the hardest. Last year I spent the week - which includes my birthday - worried about Mike, who started running fevers again on day two at our friends' wonderful beach cottage, always a sign of disease returning. I couldn't find enough blankets to help him through the chills that began the fever cycle. We kept debating whether or not to leave early. He couldn't participate much because he was too sick and miserable. We ended up staying - the children were having the best time - but I was quietly distraught. Our friend Teb and I share a birthday, and Mike managed to be a part of that big, raucous, celebratory dinner with everyone: us, Teb and family, and Teb's parents. It was capped by a glorious ice cream cake. I was forty years old that day.

This year, it rained at the beach on my birthday. I spent the morning in a laundry mat. I hadn't slept well for about three nights and felt shaky. I retired upstairs in the afternoon, telling everyone I needed a rest, and spent hours on my twin bed while the oscillating fan slowly yet insistently shook its head no, no, no blowing back and forth across my bare legs, a novel open facedown on my belly, listening to the kids play downstairs, crying and crying. The sadness went on and on, as if I were suspended in some kind of terrible grief-jello inside of which time slowed to a near-stop, trapped by the pain of growing older without Mike and the clarity of memories from last year and the year before that too (Mike's doctor Owen called on the night of my 39th birthday to tell us Mike's relapse was confirmed by the biopsy he'd had the week before in New York; Mike was already asleep and I cried on the phone after we'd talked it all through, surprisingly myself by impulsively telling him in a spirit of feeble protest: but Owen, today is my birthday).

The tears didn't stop. I wasn't sure what to do after awhile. I heard the kids shush each other in the hall outside the door because Mama was sleeping. I heard life go on below, people coming and going, and I thought: this is what it's like to be on the outside of life. And also, this is what it's like to not know how to step back into life. Finally I did the only thing that made sense: I put on my bathing suit and walked downstairs, cried with my friends on the bottom step, and then walked around the corner and across the sand and into the bracing, seaweedy Long Island Sound. Stroke, stroke, kick in the cold water towards the horizon, until I felt like myself again.

That worked pretty well. The rest of the night was marvelous.

In Rockaway, on our last evening, the children were settled in various activities with our friends after a long hot day walking in Brooklyn. I wanted to get back into the ocean one last time, before we left in the morning, and no one wanted to come with me. So again I went by myself to the water (which is  a few yards from our friends' airy, inviting home). The air was chilly and the wind was strong. The hair on my arms was standing on end. I sat in the sand, facing the water, hoping I'd warm up enough to brave the cold rough waves, whose mood seemed downright aggravated. Instead I watched a group of skinny boys leaping with increasing abandon from the now-vacant lifeguard's chair, and another family at the water's edge daring each other to get into the water (no one went in past their knees, despite one teenage girl's attempts at surprise pushes). An outageously beautiful, sunned, European-looking couple began making out a few yards to my right, past the leaping boys. Ryan stopped over to say hello on his way to surf before dinner. I watched his long, spare, wet-suited body paddling into the irritable waves.

I beheld the water, and the people around it, and I cried. I thought how drops of water make up those waves that seem to be alive, that seem to have distinctive moods, and how all those drops move across the earth, touching shores that I will never see, and many that I have.

Water, ever-moving, touches every place. Might it touch every time? As I sat shivering on the sand, those waves connected me to a hundred times and places spent with Mike.

In a Montenegrin coastal village, sunning ourselves by the deep blue Adriatic Sea, deciding it was - despite our initial aversion to the concrete block hotel and rough manners of the concierge and endlessly chatty British tourists we were supposed to sit beside during meals - a perfect place, and that we would have to find a way to invite all our favorite people to come for a blowout tenth wedding anniversary week to this sleepy beach town where, judging from the reaction of cafe and hotel workers, we seemed to be the first American tourists ever. The gorgeous deep waters, the crumbling Orthodox monasteries built into the green hillsides, the empty coastline - we loved it.

On a pedal boat, cycling our legs furiously in an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay, cursing the very idea that this would be fun on a steamy day, sweating inside our obligatory life jackets, Mike trying to convince red-cheeked Frances that she was "steering" our boat while I held baby Gabriel, who at that developmental moment was a terrible napper. We all agreed: the only good thing about that ill-conceived voyage at Quiet Waters park was the pleasure of seeing Gabriel fall asleep immediately, rocked by the gentle movements of the water, and stay asleep until the moment we returned to land.

On the bank of the Susquehanna River, elated at the midway point of the Tucquan's Glen trail, accompanied by our children and Teb and Diana's daughters Tessa and Annika, smiling at each other in amazement and gratitude at what Mike could do during that gorgeous, golden fall on a clinical trial that had very few side effects.

On a dock that jutted into a lake near Newpaltz, NY, where Mike and I, at 23 and 21, had decided to have a real vacation. We stayed at a bed and breakfast owned by a man named Doug who gave us an exhaustive tour of our colonial-era room, which included - memorably - him citing the year that the hinges on our door were made. We couldn't even look at each other during his humorless lecture, knowing we'd start laughing and not be able to stop. The next morning we went to a lake, and soon after we arrived a busload of middle schoolers from the Bronx did too. Mike and I were delighted by everything that weekend, including the kids, and I remember jumping off the dock, swimming out into the bright lake, and faintly hearing a girl sitting near Mike, who was still on the dock, remark: wow, she is really good at swimming. Yeah, he said, she is.

At the beach in Lewes, swimming near the shore in the Delaware Bay, watching Mike sitting in a folding chair and holding a squinty, sandy, not-so-sure-about-this-whole-beach-thing Beatrice on his lap beneath the shade of an umbrella. She was four months old. I felt impossibly free and happy, feeling the water gently holding me afloat, moving without encumbrance, seeing my husband and children on the shore, my niece and nephews, all of life enacted on the bright land while I watched from the cool sea.

Along the Mediterranean, midway through our month-long European honeymoon, on a hot and sweaty hike along the trail that connected the Cinque Terre villages, and then ending at the charming, quiet, rocky beach near the apartment we'd rented for a week, sliding into that inviting blue water together, grinning from ear to ear, not even needing to articulate the thought we knew we were both having: are we really here, swimming off the coast of Italy, surrounded by all this beauty, absolutely contented in body and spirit - can it be real?

And so much more water touched our lives: a North Carolina hike with all three kids that brought us to the most glorious waterfalls; a sad, irritable afternoon spent by the Carribean; crossing the waterways of Annapolis over and over, an exhiliaring afternoon in the frothing cold water of Soda Dam in New Mexico, a freezing dip in a lake outside the inn owned by my coworkers' parents in the Catskills, an unexpected summer plunge into the East River. All those scalding hot baths, the only place I could stand to be after Mike died.

I've spent my entire adult life with someone who was always quick to admit that he wasn't a strong swimmer - who was relatively indifferent to the lure of water - yet he put his toes in with me over and over again. He knew I always had to get in. He never grumbled about it.

What is water's allure about? More than any other element, it enlivens. It buoys. One rises and falls in the waves without a fight. You can float on its surface, suspended between air and sea. Its murky deeps stir up vague fears. The very sound of it triggers a nervous system down-shift.

Water, touching every place and every time, connects me to the becoming of myself, a woman who is indeed many things, but as this sorrow keeps spinning out I see that central among them is a person who grew up in relationship to, and defined against, and yearning for, and in conversation with, and more often than not completely absorbed by Mike Brogan, a man unlike any I have ever known.

Waves, tell me, who can I possibly be now that he no longer walks beside me?