libraries on planet widow

After work on Friday I closed on our new house. On Saturday, with the help of strong friends, we moved everything from the house we were renting to the new one. On Sunday, I met movers bright and early at a storage unit where everything from Annapolis has been patiently waiting for me and spent the morning and early afternoon directing them. They kept bringing things in the open front door, and I kept feeling waves of surprise and delight to be reunited with so many old friends: oh, the crazy quilt is here! the piano! the beautiful shelves!

And the books. Boxes upon boxes, stacks upon stacks. Mike's office on campus, his home office, and years of acquisitive impulses that went unchecked in used bookstores everywhere we lived were spread before me. It was impossible to walk in the room where I kept directing the movers to deposit them all.

The more I unpack, the more there seems to be, sliding in small hills and stacks all over the floor, and tucked in between them are Mike's notebooks. He nearly always kept an intellectual journal, which sometimes served as a personal spiritual journal too. Rather, his philosophical passions seemed to be expressions that sprang from a bottomless well of spiritual yearning. Mike journaled to work out things like his intellectual development in relationship to figures in Continental philosophy, the nature of his belief in God, what exactly Thomas Aquinas was getting at in a particular subsection of the Summa Theologia. In another time and place he'd have made an exquisite Talmudic scholar. He had a restlessness for the truth that propelled him through stacks of notebooks. The very slant of his handwriting suggests urgency.

And now I have them all. So I shelve three books, and then I open a notebook, scanning for something personal, something about me. Did I figure in his imagination? Did our daily life together touch any part of his thinking life? There are a few passing references, but not much. Flipping through the notebooks stirs up feelings about a pattern in our relationship that at times left me feeling uncomfortably like a demanding child. I'd look to him for recognition; he'd look to his books.

So I'm feeling all those feelings. And I'm finding the book of Emily Dickinson poems I gave him, and  the Lorrie Moore short stories we both loved, and the set of Narnia books my grandfather gave me in the second grade that Mike read aloud to Frances and then Gabriel. And then another peek in a notebook. Still obsessively single-minded about the nature of God, the universe, and your relationship to it all? Yep. Okay, just checking. And then back to the books, taking a few to the front porch for passersby to take, setting some aside to move to the children's bedrooms, picking them up, putting them down again, tripping over a pile, stroking a cat's ears, picking up another notebook - basically making little to no progress at all and spending the last moments of the portion of my day off from work while the children were still at school doing exactly what I wanted to be doing.

Then they came home. I told them to quickly get themselves a snack, not even looking up from a Thomas Merton book that Mike had penciled notes in, because it was almost time to go.

Oh no Mama. Don't make us. We won't do it. Why, why?

Because we're just going to try it, I mumbled, still picking up and putting down books in piles at my feet.

But a support group?? We already have a support group. It's called all our friends and family. Everyone who loves us. AND SUPPORTS US!

Well, this is different. And it's just an assessment, to learn more about the group and for the people who run the group to learn more about you. We're going to see what it's like.

And so I gathered my groaning children into the car to be assessed for the Coping Kids and Teens bereavement support group at the Pathways Center for Grief and Loss that is housed in the same buidling as the inpatient hospice that we made plans to transport Mike to the very morning that he died.

We were ushered into a library space to wait for the counselors and encouraged to peruse and if we wanted, check out one of the books. The impersonal "peaceful" music playing, the hum of the air conditioning, the quiet halls, the tasteful furniture - the combined effect set the four of us on edge. Of course I tried not to show it. Each child reluctantly took a turn speaking privately with a counselor and so I spent over an hour and a half in the library, glancing over all those spines and the neat labels below each section: Children's - Religious, Loss of a Pet, Illness and Loss, Caregiving and Grief.

This was not my library. These were not my books. I was afflicted by the strangest sense of disorientation. What the hell was I doing in this hushed room full of books with titles like Planet Widow while my children were being evaluated for placement in a bereavement support group? Did Mike die or something? Did any of this 'nice nice' stuff, as Gabriel might call it, have anything to do with me, with my family, with my reality? Whose idea was it to come here anyway?

While Mike was sick, he and I sometimes acknowledged - no, confessed - how uninterested we were in fundraising efforts like Relay for Life, encouraging friends to support the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society, or identifying in any way as a cancer patient. What did that even mean? We suspected it was pride getting in our way. Mike's disease was rare, our experience was unusual - our situation was different. How could the word cancer somehow communicate something essential about Mike or our family? We didn't want cancer support groups, or to hear other people's stories about their uncle's triumphant ten year battle with colon cancer, or to read books about how to help kids cope with cancer. We just wanted to muscle through it in our own way.

Was that hubris? I don't know. Would Mike be on the kids' side (and truth be told, my own private, fearful side) with the whole grief support group thing? I don't know that either. Probably not. He'd want them to know they weren't alone. He'd want them to be given the space to mourn in their own way, apart from the pressures of school and family and incredibly stressful house-moving. I know that.

Sometimes when I find myself and the children in social situations that are stretching our limits (and that I, of course, have pushed us into), I let Mike's spirit come to me. I can almost hear him say, as he so often did in life: Meagan. Let's get the rock out of here. And that's how I know it's fine to leave. It's fine to walk right out of Vacation Bible School with Beatrice, six minutes after signing her up. It's fine to leave a party early. It's fine to get ready for and then decide against attending a school function. I don't always do it, but I know I can, thanks to Mike.

Mike didn't suggest we split while I was waiting in that grief library. I noticed. I'm not sure if we'll do the group yet, but I think I'm glad we went today.

It's good to try. And it's good to know you can leave.

And it's really good to come home to your books. All of them.

winter in fall

We're moving on Saturday. It'll be the fourth one in fewer than three years, and you'd think by now I'd be used to the whole upheaval business. But this process has been harder for me in every way. It really began back in April, when I had to begin clearing out our old house in Annapolis for sale (which will finally - fingers crossed and pleading eyes cast heavenward - close later in October). Every step has asked me to confront the fact of Mike's death, and consider the artifacts of our family history, deciding over and over again: keep it? goodwill it? cry over it, throw it away?

Yesterday faithful friends came over to help pack in anticipation of the move, and I found the Red Stroller in the basement. It was a gift from Mike's parents when Frances was born and subsequently wheeled by me and Mike over countless miles. We navigated it over bumpy sidewalks, boosted it up and over the side of tall curbs, slid it through patches of slushy melting snow, lifted it together up porch steps and pushed it around gnarled roots. We cajoled and distracted babies into submitting to its black vinyl straps. We showed grandparents and friends how to kick the bottom just so, in order to coax it into the folded position. Its mesh fabric base held beer bottles that clinked cheerfully on our way to the neighbors' for tacos, and cantelopes and eggs on the long uphill walk home from market, and library books to return as we wended our slow way down S. Cherry Grove, chatting with neighbors and inevitably stashing a tricycle behind a bush when its rider tired and opted to walk. The Red Stroller transported all three children for at least two or three years apiece.

Now an unsettling spray of gray pinpoints of mold is spreading in its folded hood. Its original rider is a teenager. There will be no more babies; there's no reason to carry it into a new basement. It's time to say goodbye.

I saw the unexpected splash of faded red next to the trash bins out of my bathroom window while I brushed my teeth this morning and felt the heaviness of time passing settle over me like a leaden shawl.

It's strange to think that part of why I can experience the sadness of change like this is that Mike - who felt things so deeply, and had a real penchant for nostalgia - isn't here. A stroller going out with the trash is the kind of thing that would bring a tear to his eye if he happened to notice it in front of someone else's house. Someone he didn't even know. One of his most vivid childhood memories was the sight of another little girl en route to school who wobbled on her bike in such a way that her metal lunchbox flew open and a single perfect chocolate cupcake fell out, slowly yet insistently rolling right on down the street until it finally landed frosting-down in the gutter.

Oh, the poignancy of that lost cupcake! The look on the little girl's face! It was hers, hers to anticipate with pleasure all morning and to devour at lunch in front of all her envious friends, until a bump in the sidewalk intervened and she lost it all. Mike felt it slip through her fingers right along with her. It was so sad.

And so I would take on the steady, practical, present- and future-looking role at times of change, knowing how Mike would linger in the sadness of moves, new schools, growing children. I'd hold his hand and say, kindergarten will be amazing! Or, our new house is going to be beautiful, you'll see. Or, we don't know if this cancer will kill you, we can't know that, so let's try to enjoy the day that we do have, and hopefully tomorrow too.

Now he isn't here to protect me from my own feelings of sorrow, and my own desire to look back at what was. To really dig in to my memories, and take account of all we have lost. Thus unmoored, I stare out the window at our family's stroller while I still can, before the garbage truck rolls by in the darkness early tomorrow morning to take it away, along with so many other neglected pieces of other people's histories.

We went to a party on Saturday. A truly fun party, an annual outdoor neighborly fall party that stretches across backyards and typically features many friends, acquaintances, and people I don't know but would probably like if I did. I wanted to go because I wanted to feel like the old me - someone who enjoys the spark and fizz of a social gathering, the energy that registers with good conversation, deepening connection, and unexpected meetings. Someone who likes good food and drink, and the feeling of possibility that an evening-long unique community generates.

But I keep forgetting that I'm not the same person anymore. I'm me, but I'm me in winter. I'm me in mourning. It's so, so hard to be in the company of people who don't know that the most important thing about me is that Mike died. Or to be in mixed company, to be introduced by a friend who knows to a stranger who doesn't know. I feel dishonest if I don't somehow share that my husband died from the outset.

As in, you should know I am not someone who can keep up light banter for more than a minute or two. You should know I'm not really capable of surface-level interaction. If you want to talk, we're going to have to get down to business and it's not going to be easy. You'll apologize and feel flustered that you somehow "made" me talk about my grief, and I'll apologize that you innocently started with hi nice to meet you, how are you and ended moments later with this piece of raw, barely-guarded vulnerability.

I should wear a sign around my neck:

Grieving Widow

Cries Frequently, Brings up Loss, Has a Penchant for Dark Humor

Approach at Your Own Risk

Because really, some people would decline to engage in light chatter with me about the fall weather or the super delicious salad or the wild pack of adorable children hitting the dessert table with abandon if they knew, and I wouldn't blame them. Not everyone is comfortable with the pain I carry. I can see it in some people's eyes, an internal backing up, a little alarm system going off telling them to seek the nearest exit. I smell like danger, like the bad things that haven't happened to you but could. Don't get too close; you might somehow invite tragedy into your own life, or at the very least be asked to contend with the fragility of every precious person and thing. Keep your lunchbox lid on tight. Protect your cupcakes!

If I wore that sign, those people would know to give me a wide berth, and I would be spared the discomfort of sensing their flight.

Heck, I might avoid me in that sign. Some of us already have all we can manage for today.

So no. I don't have the springtime resiliency of the old me at a party. But I also don't have Mike. Just like I allowed him to really settle into his nostalgic feelings by providing some practical here-and-now balance, he allowed me to have another drink and enjoy a raucous conversation by keeping one eye on the door. My darling introvert. It was understood that I could go ahead and enjoy myself as long as I was attuned, as the evening wore on, to the moment when he was utterly maxed out and it was time to go. I could always feel Mike's eyes on me, and I confess I'd sometimes delay the moment I looked for him across the room to meet his and respond: yes, okay, I see you, I'll wrap this up in a few moments and get my coat. In desperate times he'd interrupt and do something socially graceful, like smile his handsome smile at my interlocutor and apologetically remind me that our babysitter had to get home by eleven. Oh yes. You're right. We'd better go.

When we first lived together in New York, at a sweet event for a new book my then-boss Dave wrote, I was chatting with various people and feeling very fizzy with all the excitement around him, enjoying my proximity to it all, feeling very grown up and yet feeling very young and full of potential. Mike was waiting patiently for me at the edge of the gathering. Finally I got my things and we walked out into the cool air, heading for the subway. Meagan, he said. You're an arm-toucher. I can't believe I fell in love with an arm-toucher.

It was true. I'd never noticed before. I definitely touch people's arms when I talk to them.

It was kind of like when I realized Mike was a passionate sports fan. Huh? You? I'm living with someone who yells at the TV?

We learn these things, and we somehow make new spaces, new allowances. There are negotiations. Ideally, it all shakes out into a mutually-beneficial albeit precarious balance.

I've been living inside of that dance since I was twenty years old. And now? Do I like parties without someone to tell me when it's time to go? Do I barely tolerate sports on TV when there is no one to watch? Do I resist crying over cupcakes, or do I sit down and sob?

It is winter, and snow covers all the paths. Oh, Mike. I cannot fathom what spring will bring.

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.