neither toil nor spin

I went to visit the cemetery by myself today. The weather was perfect - as perfect as it can be in Lancaster, Pennsylvania on a late afternoon in November following one's return from a beachy family Thanksgiving in south Florida. The sun was bright and even though my hair was still wet from a slow Sunday shower and my jacket was light and I'm a total wimp about being cold I could comfortaby sit on the grass next to Mike's grave with nary a shiver.

As soon as I got there I spotted an incongruous ladybug crawling along the rim of his gravestone's birdbath. A sign! A lucky ladybug. A greeting. As I watched its arduous course along the stone lip, I realized that it was approaching a second ladybug. Oh Mike, I said. Did you send them? It's you and me! I think you sent them. Thank you.

Those ladybugs broadcast the particular tender welcome I often feel at the cemetery. Come, sit down, spend some time with us, with Mike, with the trees and birds and cornfield beyond. Look for more signs; you'll find them if you do. You belong here with us.

Sometimes I talk to Mike, but in the midst of a challenging day it usually takes the form of an exasperated yelp, a plea for assistance, a shout of pent up sorrow. I hear myself say his name aloud often: Mike. Depending on the situation, I might go so far as to say Mike, I don't know what to do. In bathroom stalls, in the car under my breath, in my office between clients, I say things like Mike, I'm a mess. Please help. 

But the only time and place I feel like I can really talk to him is at the cemetery, alone, where it's just us. What does that mean exactly? I couldn't say.

The thing is, I spend a lot of time feeling fretful about how our lives are moving on, how I make large and small decisions all by myself now, how the kids are learning to manage life with one living parent. The future keeps unfolding. Is he still with me? Am I doing the work of taking Mike with us? How do I keep him close - feel his difficulty, his difference, his power - when in the blur of a regular grief-cast Tuesday with a job and three children it's hard enough to make space for my own thoughts and feelings, let alone his?

So the comfort I feel at the cemetery is profound. I don't know if I'm doing anything right. I don't know if I'm honoring Mike in my day to day life choices (though I pray I am), I don't know how to keep leaning into this strange widowed parenting future. But to see those ladybugs, the drifting clouds overhead, the crows lifting en masse from the bare branches of the tree into the bright sky, the beautiful headstone full of clean cold rainwater, to feel a resistance-less sinking into sadness and connection?  Being there, part of me (Mike?) whispers that it doesn't matter if I'm fucking everything up. There's no doing it right. There's only showing up, arriving, again and again, broken and smiling and crying, unmoored yet somehow staying in the harbor.

I like to talk out loud about everyday things to Mike at the cemetery. The kids (same old worries), updates on family and friends, things I've been reading or thinking about. Today I heard myself complaining about something - and then I hesitated, like, should I bring Mike this kind of crap? - and then I realized something. I don't have to worry about protecting him from anything. He doesn't feel agitated or judgemental or pissed off about small and basically unimportant things anymore.

Because how could he? He's made the passage, he has died to this version of life. Mike must see with transformed vision now. It hit me: Mike has changed, and I have too. I can't re-enter our relationship in the same way, because we have been forever transformed by his death.

Later I told him I'd been feeling old, unattractive. Worried about my sad and achey body. I quickly added that I know, I know, he'd love a tired old aging body. Beats the alternative, as they say. You'd think after walking our path together I'd be all gratitude and light, all cured of any residual body image fretting, immune to the tyrannical consumerist wellness culture that Mike found mildly oppressive as a healthy person and acutely oppressive as a cancer patient. But here I am, without his ballast in my ship, sending an embarrasing amount of money to artisanal organic skincare companies and debating how to handle my thinning and increasingly graying hair.

Again, at first I confessed these worries to Mike with embarrassment, with anticipation of his exasperated response. But a minute later, again I realized he wasn't exasperated at all. Mike is a new, unknowable being, but I do know that in dying he let go of many things. So much fell away in the process, all the small irritations and judgements, the insecurities and fears, the leftover anger and worries. The spaces left behind gradually filled with love, even though he was frightened and suffering.

How could the person I held as he passed into death possibly care if his wife dyes her hair, or doesn't dye her hair, or worries about dyeing her hair?

At the cemetery I told him I felt bad about how I looked; in time I knew his only response was tender compassion.

Later in the evening I took the children to try out a contemplative mass at our new church. I was nervous, worried that it would be a lot of serious, silent adults annoyed by the presence of whispering children. Well, maybe they were - I don't know. But we did it. The gospel portion of the service was lectio divina, a practice of close, contemplative listening/reading to a short passage of the Bible. Mike often used this approach to prayer. Father Leo, the Catholic priest who did Mike's service, encouraged me to try it in the panicky sleepless weeks after Mike died. (I did, though couldn't stick with it).

Not surprisingly, we listened - three or four times - to Matthew: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet even Solomon in all his glory was not clothed like one of these.

They neither toil nor spin. This phrase stayed with me.

Neither toil nor spin, Meagan. I looked up at the illuminated painting of Jesus on the cross in the chapel as I stroked Beatrice's hair, her head resting on my lap, feeling grateful for her patience in this strange silent room, and for the first time it occured to me: Jesus had to go through the dying process, too. He was also human, and knew he would die, and had to say goodbye and let go of his concerns about things like what would happen to his disciples and his mother, to Judas, whether or not he had completed his work, what he would eat and wear tomorrow. Dying is becoming like the lilies of the field.

We are all dying, all the time, but only those who are facing their death in a visceral and true way know what it is to be stripped of all the unimportant worries and preoccupations that tether us to yesterday, today, tomorrow.

Jesus died for our sins is a slogan that has always left me cold. What does it even mean? How can it provide any comfort? I hear that sentence and I think, please, Jesus, don't do me any favors. Don't put this on me. But something about connecting Jesus's experience on the cross tonight with Mike's experience in the hospital opened a space in my heart. God became flesh, and He didn't just die - because no one just dies - he went through the process of suffering, of dying. He became like the lilies, like the ladybugs, stripped of worry, of anxious busy-ness, all presence, all fullness. All love.

Does it sound too tidy? I guess it is. It's so hard to put language on some of this disoriented, light emanating from around a dark corner I cannot quite see, sorrow-laden stuff.

I realized today that I cannot be inside my old relationship with Mike, I cannot carry that forward, because it died when he did. He was transformed, and in a smaller way, I was too. What I feel grateful for is the peace this realization brought with it. I don't know who I am, or who he is, or who we are now that he has died. But miraculously, tonight anyway, I don't feel anxious. If Jesus could approach and pass through this terrifying door alongside us, then maybe it's okay to not have a clue.

Neither toil nor spin. At first I heard Meagan, chill out, it's okay to leave some dishes in the sink, it's okay to let Beatrice watch crappy shows on Netflix while you get something done, it's okay if the kids forget to change their sheets. But then, in time, I heard it in a deeper way: Meagan, it's okay if you don't know what to do. It's okay if you cry a lot today, and not at all tomorrow. It's okay if you're messing up life without Mike. Just keep showing up. Keep turning towards to sun.

Thanks, Jesus.

all saints

On this mountain the Lord of hosts will make for all peoples
       a feast of rich food, a feast of well-aged wines,
       of rich food filled with marrow, of well-aged wines strained clear.
And he will destroy on this mountain
       the shroud that is cast over all peoples,
       the sheet that is spread over all nations;
       he will swallow up death forever.

That's the reading from Isaiah for today, the feast of All Saints. All Saints really does mean all the saints - all the holy ones that have come before us, known and unknown, remembered and forgotten, still connected to us, still part of our story. I left a message on a random person named Debbie's voice mail around 11 pm last night, asking her to add my husband Michael's name to the list that will be read aloud on Sunday's All Souls service at our still-new church.

All Souls developed as a day to pray for all who have recently died, in order to expedite and support their passage through purgatory.

I do not, however, believe Mike is in purgatory.

(Incidentally, the warm and wonderful Catholic priest that knew and buried Mike told me after he died that he didn't believe Mike was in purgatory, either; he thought Mike had done the harrowing spiritual work required of him on earth, and was now fully in the presence of God).

(I took, and take, great comfort in that).

(I'm not sure if that qualifies him for recognition on All Saints or All Souls, or both. I vote for both.)

Well, I'm obviously unclear on the technicalities. But I want very much to pray for him in a holy place, and to hear his name read aloud in community.

In our Annapolis church we always had a New Orleans style jazz band play for All Souls Sunday. It was a raucous and sacred and fitting commemoration of those we loved whom we could no longer see and touch. I loved to remember and pray for and smile about and conjure my dad in the midst of that nearly unhinged, joyous music. We chose to have Beatrice baptized during that service, so that we could explicitly welcome her into a communion of saints that stretched before and behind her, to the misty horizon and beyond.

I don't know what to make of the vision in Isaiah. I am moved to awe, to fear by the voices in scripture that clearly name our hearts' deepest longings. It's scary to say just what you want. The risk hope requires is terrifying.

I do want more than anything for God to wipe away the tears from all our faces. I want the heavy shroud cast over me to be lifted, light and gauzy, and to watch it float away. I long for the sheet that seems to have darkened and closed in over all the nations, and most especially and tragically over our nation, to billow up on a fresh, cold breeze and resettle in a harmless pile at the foot of the bed. I want Mike to be basking in God's brilliant presence right now.

And I want him to, as he fully believed he would, be resurrected. To walk in glory in the communion of saints. To sing and play baseball and hold his children and behold the sunlight shining through the golden leaves on the first day of November - all of it made new, all of it more miraculous than we now know it to be.

I don't have his faith. I have a yearning for his faith. Or rather, I have a yearning for a faith that might be my own. Spiritual restlessness was always his bag. There wasn't much room for my own longing for transcendence and clarity, which were always distinctive from his. Maybe I could have made that space for myself, but I never really did. Instead I tried to clear a path for him.

So here I am, closing in on eight months of widowhood, fumbling to balance the comfort things like a passage in Isaiah read early in the morning on All Saints Day brings me - simply because it is Mike's, because I know he loved it - with my own growing hope that I can hold that connection to him while making more space for my own path to emerge.

The things is, I still feel like the most important thing about me is that Mike died. I still can't feel comfortable socially unless everyone around me knows - and accepts - that I might start crying at any moment, because everything refers back to that brutal reality I'm living. Anything of note - be it beautiful, happy, sad, hilarious, insightful, smart, poignant, tragic, enraging, triumphant, disastrous - brings his absence into even sharper relief. He's not here for it. 

I use the word widow at least six or seven times a day. I want to. I want to acknowledge that I have become a new kind of person and I can never go back. There's a special word for it, and I claim it. It's not unlike becoming a parent. You have no idea how you will be transformed forever when you move past that irreversible boundary, only that you will be. Things can never be the same again. Crossing into widowhood is the only other transformation I've experienced that comes close to the changed-forever quality of crossing into parenthood. I know the intensity of the pain will lessen eventually with time, but the deep knowing of what it is to lose my beloved partner will never leave me.

So it's weird. An essential part of my identity has changed forever. I am not the person I was the moment Mike died in my arms because Mike died in my arms. But I don't want to be different, because I want to be able to feel Mike with me, as he was, as I was, as we were. I dreamed last night that he walked into the new house and was angry with me about everything, just everything, going from room to room, taking stock of all the frustrating arrangements and messes and new items. In the dream I thought - you've wanted him to come back more than anything, and now he's here, and look what's happened!

I must be afraid of all the changing that threatens to pull me even further away from my beloved. But it's such a set up. How can anything be the same? The very structure of this grief has marked me, marked us and transformed us in suffering and the struggle to find a new way to be a family.

I need to trust Mike's wisdom. I need to find a way to touch his profound love for us. He knew I'd be changed forever in widowhood. He probably knew I'd need to strike out on my own spiritual path, too. He has made his own passage, and even though my faith flickers and sputters like a nearly burned down tealight nestled in a pumpkin at the sticky overtired end of the night I do believe Mike must now see with some of God's own vision, which can only be love, which can only encompass and forgive and protect us, and can never begrudge things like an outdoor table poorly spray painted aqua and hastily sought nose piercings and take out pizza yet again and other questionable choices I've made since he died.

I'm a widow. Love is stronger than death. Amen.


     

goodbye to uncomplicated joy

When you take care of someone you love for a very long time, the world narrows. There's a distillation of your experience, a falling away of everyday things, and the world outside becomes another place - a place you no longer live. A place where people go to work and school and exercise class, vacations and concerts and parties; a place where people complain about roof repairs and back pain, ornery children and stubborn spouses; a place where people eat, drink, speak, and breathe easily, without a second thought. I took care of Mike in our own vivid and harrowing world for so long. It was soaked through with the pain of love, and the vision that love grants, so much so that I could often only participate for brief moments - I had to maintain my ability to function and so usually hovered at the periphery, while Mike in his profound courage remained open to grief - and grace - much of the time.

How often did I glance at him while the children were having fun, laughing over something absurd at dinner or watching a funny movie, and see tears in his eyes? He was already walking the path that was waiting for me. I now cannot see the end of it, let alone any variation in its rocky terrain.

I often sought distractions when we were traveling to Philadelphia or New York for treatment, or during endless waits in exam rooms. I always brought a book. I liked to listen to an audio book on our drives (the same one for months, Kristin Lavransdatter; I loved it but now am terrified by the idea of picking up where we left off). I would arrange child care or update family and friends via text in waiting rooms, or while we sat in the emergency department waiting for Mike to be admitted. Sometimes he napped; sometimes he was too feverish or uncomfortable to focus anyway. But usually he preferred to sit quietly and wait. If anything, he'd review notes and questions we had for the doctor. Once I asked why he seemed annoyed with me for reading a magazine - and honestly, the plentiful glossy magazines at the cancer institute got me through those first months of chemo and radiation; they were soothing, shiny reminders of the world outside that I then hoped was waiting for our return - and he told me that he would like it if we two could be shoulder to shoulder, holding hands, facing down the cancer beast all the time. That it seemed we were more likely to triumph if we spent all our available focus and energy staring it down, two warriors taut, poised, and ready on a battlefield, gazing at the horizon, waiting for signs of the enemy approach.

That's not a good way for me to cope with this day to day, I said. I need breaks, I said. I can't stay that vigilant; I'll fall apart.

I know, he said. I know you can't do that. I just wish you could sometimes.

Now I feel a pit of guilt when I think of that conversation, and of how little undistracted, focused time I gave Mike. I know I did the best I could. But I wish I could have done better.

I had to keep one unsteady foot in the outside world, where our children went to school and sports practice and music lessons, and where I sometimes worked. But Mike really did spend most of his time in the battlefield/monastery/hospital. His reality was the real, saturated, painful, heart-filled center of my life. Even though he did most of the emotional heavy-lifting, we both saw life as achingly precious, all the time, because it was so constantly threatened. We felt the fragility of sweetness: the adorable linguistic accidents that come with being three, a phrase played on the piano for the twentieth time, a fluttering bird at the feeder. All of it was so crushingly beautiful. During the brief times Mike could enjoy a spell of better health, he would sometimes get frustrated by how quickly he lost that cracked-openness to life's excruciating beauty. But Mike, I'd say. It's hard to live like that all the time.

Once we were talking about his probable death, in one of the rare times we were alone and I allowed myself to walk into that grief-space with him. I was sitting at the kitchen table and he was standing nearby in a flannel robe, pulling out his meds from the cabinet. In a fit of sorrow and despair, I blurted that if he died, I would live my life for the children. I would be for them. They would be my reason. He didn't need to worry; I'd take care of them. Because what else would I have?

And now I do live for them, it's true. But sometimes, surprisingly, I also feel the tug of my own unfolding being. I feel my own self asking for my attention and care.

But it's terrifying to want things just for me. Living my own life means actively signing onto a life without Mike. How can I want to keep putting one foot in front of the other, forging ahead, knowing Mike isn't alive here with me?

But I do. I want wonderful meals, and friends new and old, and fantasy yoga retreats, and good books and movies and music, and October hikes, and generous glasses of wine. Some of these are things I would not pursue with my husband, because he wouldn't enjoy them. Some he would absolutely love. Some are things I want because he died and I feel an urgent need to tend to my bottomless grief. In any case, the wanting them, and the doing them, are all colored by the loss of him.

Everything shines brighter, more ragged and raw, through the eyes of grief. Everything from my morning coffee (he would shudder to see how sloppily I make it) to the disappointing session at work (I can't tell him about it) to the unbelievably difficult and stressful house-selling process that was supposed to end at settlement this past Friday and is still unresolved (he would be screaming - throat cancer or no - to the powers that be at the title company and realty firms).

I can't join the outside world after all, because I still live outside it. Once I spent my days in the intensity of caregiving and medical management and parenting with a gravely ill partner; now I live in the pure, searing intensity of mourning.

Nights are terrible. I can't give up and go to sleep - I seem to be waiting for something to change. Waiting to end the day differently, somehow. Waiting for Mike, I guess. Mornings are equally bad. Seven months later, waking up in the still darkness without my husband is a real bitch. But a lot happens in between these sorrowful bookends. They frame and put into relief the miraculous nature of creation that reliably shines into my days. Colors are more vivid; feelings more powerful; autumn's beauty tears through me with a relentlessness that seems almost cruel. That light! That golden late afternoon light illuminating the bricks and tree limbs of downtown Lancaster. It hurts me. 

We're in a new house that Mike never shared with us. We're creating new routines. We're trying to be honest about asking for the support we need and we're trying to receive it graciously. We fight and cry a lot. We're basically fumbling around in what some people have called "our new normal." Good God, do I hate that phrase. There is nothing normal about this.

Yet there are many good and true and beautiful things in our lives, and I open my arms to them knowing that the pain will twist and pinch even more. Every joyful thing must be greeted in the light of my love's absence.

I cannot say no to joy; nor can I ever feel it with the pure simplicity I once did.

Mike died, and nothing will ever be the same. How could it be? And yet I miss the irretrievable, normal, outside world - and our place in it - so very much.

my life is too hard for me today

Here's what I want to do: rant.

Swear and rant. Rant and swear. Fuckety fuck fuck.

I want to tell you about my too-hard day, my too-hard week. I do recognize that people in Florida have lost their homes, that Brett Kavanaugh is now a Supreme Court justice, that there are families in my city that don't have enough to eat tonight. I know. It's just that I'm having a Melania moment. I hear she is the most bullied person in the world. Yes. Exactly. And I, it turns out, am having the hardest week in the world.

It started with my final visit to our house in Annapolis, the last place Mike was well, the last place I lived in which I didn't have to ask friends for help every other day. I was collecting the last pieces of furniture before the settlement next week. I asked three friends to help me on the driving/loading side, and three more friends to help me back in Lancaster on the unloading side. I found a picture of Gabriel, aged three, in his Halloween costume in the garage. I found the hand weights Mike got for his thirteenth birthday. I said goodbye to the house.

It was a challenge to fit everything into our new place, which continues to feature chaotic disaster zones that are beginning to make my skin crawl. If I leave a box full of the contents of Frances's desk when she was nine in the corner of the kitchen, it remains in the corner of the kitchen. If anything, it grows, as other things are gradually placed on top of it because there is nowhere else to put them, things like a basket of scarves, a box of framed pictures, and Mike's old Latin textbooks. Because I am the only person who will ever move them. Because this big pile of bricks filled to capacity with stuff is my responsibility. People occasionally see me and say, congratulations on your new house! And I say ...huh?

And then they cheerily say, so how's the move going? Are you all settled in?

And I say, well ... no. No I'm not. And I want to add that it's unsettling as hell to live in a jumbled museum of our family's history where nothing seems to have a proper place yet, where reminders of the life we used to live are everywhere. No object has become part of the landscape yet, so all of it retains its power to recall past times and places with a vividness that scrapes at my insides. The Freiman Stolzfus print I gave to Mike for Christmas six years ago is resting on my old dresser, propped next to the Fra Angelico Anunciation that I hung opposite Mike's bed in our last house while he was hospitalized at Penn last December for his stem cell transplant. It was part of my Christmas present for him: making our bedroom a more beautiful place in which he might convalesce. I remembered how he loved that image, how we both did, when we visited San Marco in Florence during our extended traveling honeymoon. Two small images lean against a white wall opposite my too-big empty bed, but they stir up many stories: everything from our honeymoon to a Christmas years ago when Mike was healthy and Beatrice was growing inside me to the torment of Mike's near-month in the hospital and all the emergency rides back and forth between Lancaster and Philadelphia to the site of the Anunciation hanging above Mike while he sat in the orange chair and I set up the IV tubing on the floor at his feet every afternoon, leaning my head against his bony knee while I primed the pump.

So this move is just killing me. I am brittle and short-tempered with the kids, who are less independent than usual because they don't know where anything is or how anything works. My patience has bowed and broken under the weight of all these damn boxes. I repeat phrases with increasing irritation and volume to the disoriented children as if they were tourists who didn't speak the language and I a rude native.

The guitar picks are on the blue shelf. The BLUE shelf. They're on the BLUE SHELF. The BLUE SHELF. THE BLUE SHELF NEXT TO THE PIANO.

Finally a bewildered Gabriel will ask, but which blue shelf?

All I can muster is one more useless bellow. THE BLUE SHELF NEXT TO THE PIANO.

I harangue them; they protest. They don't want to do chores; they don't want to practice their instruments; they don't like it when I come home from work; they don't like it when I go to work. They don't like it when I cry. They don't like it when I make whole wheat pasta for dinner, when I ask them to scoop the kitty litter, when I get mad that they still haven't taken the books on the stairs up to their rooms. Beatrice doesn't like it when I have to interrupt bedtime reading in order to help Frances find a new place to plug in the keyboard because the piano tuner hasn't called me back and she needs to practice. Gabriel doesn't like it when I make him come home from his best friends' house, where he'd much rather live, because their parents are nice and fun. They don't like it when I'm texting when they want to talk to me. No one likes it when I ask one kid to stop talking so I can hear what the other one is saying. No one likes it when their homework was left outside in the rain and is all smeary and ruined and all I do is calmly suggest seeking out a hair dryer. When I asked Beatrice if she would please take out napkins and put them on the table before dinner tonight she said no.

Beatrice. Please put them on the table.

And do you know what she said then? My loose-toothed, dirty-footed, book-loving, Abba-singing kindergartener, while rolling her gorgeous blue eyes with adolescent flair?

Oh fine. Fine, Mama.

Sometimes people tell me my kids will look back and admire me for all this. That they will see what we went through and how I took care of their Papa and them and they will really, truly appreciate how hard it was. They'll see how much I loved them and love them still.

But I don't know. I fear I am not being the mama they need right now; why would they look back with admiration? I fear they will resent me. Stay mad. Because what if I stay sad? Having a dead Papa and a sad Mama is no good way to live, especially when you're a kid.

I'm sad and I'm stretched thin. I go to work and wash the dishes and feed the cats and arrange transportation to lessons and look for all the paid house-related receipts to scan and send to my realtor in advance of the closing next week and pay the bills and wash Beatrice's hair and lock the doors at night. It's so fucking hard.

I can't be all the things they want. I don't even know if I can be all the things they need. I wish Mike were here.