the year of the narwhal

Mike hated fun.

I can hear him right now, in response to me asking him to participate in some event we'd been invited to with feigned innocence and a determined looking away from my own ambivalence about such things: Meagan. You know how much I hate fun.

He meant commonly understood fun, like an amusement park in August or a fireworks display that goes on and on or a beer-themed 5K or standing around in the middle of Times Square in fifteen degree weather crushed by thousands of people wearing stupid hats and blowing noisemakers. Also anything that someone tried to convince him to do by saying c'mon, it'll be fun!

Mike found New Year's Eve to be mildly annoying. The pressure to have fun, the mustering of renewed celebratory energies after one has been bulldozed by the sugar and alcohol and family tensions and sheer consumerist weight of Christmas. Mike's new year was really early September anyway. He loved the ritual of school supply shopping, making new systems, getting organized and ready for the coming semester. That was the time for excitement and resolutions. We figured out once that he had only lived through six Septembers that didn't involve going back to school. Two of those were the window between college and grad school during which we fell in love. I was there and can attest that even though he wasn't actually going back to school, his heart was in the going back to school spirit, and he walked with an extra bounce in his step down our cracked Brooklyn sidewalks. Force of habit.

So our New Year's were mostly quiet ones, though even Mike succumbed to proper parties at times. I am thinking of one occassion when he uncharacteristically drank too much and danced with friends in a darkened Philadelphia apartment strung with Christmas lights and sticky with spilled drinks, wildly and even, with me, a bit suggestively, singing along with pop songs (because he knew all the words to all of them) and I was absoultely grinning inside and out at my reserved beloved- ha! Mike! What fun we're having! 1999 was more typical: we hung out with friends earlier in the evening and made it home to our apartment by midnight. We brought wine up to the roof and watched the fireworks and waited for some Y2K disaster to unfold before our eyes. It didn't, so we drained our glasses and climbed back in through the window. Thus began our 21st century.

So many friends have kindly commented to me that it will be a good thing to leave 2018 behind. That it was the very worst year, and it's time to be done with it. This is sort of true. But what is more true is that a year that Mike never got to see is in fact much worse than a year he lived in with us.

I feel afraid of 2019. I feel afraid of a future that just keeps going and going without my husband in it.

Grief feels like terror sometimes. It evokes particular fears: what if I forget, what if I dishonor him, what if I can never feel simple happiness again, what if there is no life after death, what if I could have advocated for him better, what if my children are hurt in ways I cannot help with, what if I squandered our time? But sometimes, without any content at all, I am gripped by it, the pain a mix of fear and anxiety and acute, acute sorrow.

Last night I went to the movies with my friend Diana. The movies! I was so happy to sit in the dark with an enormous bag of popcorn between us watching something decidedly inappropriate for children. We got home, we chatted and laughed with all the kids and her husband Teb who had fed them and stayed with them and mercifully cleaned every inch of my kitchen, including the dread stovetop. What wonderful friends I have! Everyone went home, my exhausted children went to bed, and I sat up late, feeling lost and alone. The beginning of the day and the end of the day are always the hardest for me, but this was worse than usual. Finally I cried and cried and talked to Mike until the tightest tangle of the terror feeling loosened.

I'm just not ready for 2019. I can't put on Mike's cavalier cloak of who-cares-about-New-Year's. Instead I'm just standing here naked, wrinkles and cellulite and all of it exposed, defenseless against the relentless ticking away. The numbers are changing, the date will be different, there's a new calendar in the kitchen and in my office, the world is screaming it from all sides. Time keeps barreling us along. Part of me wants it to, so that I will hurt less. A bigger part of me wants it to please slow down, or better yet, stop and move backwards instead.

Our friends Sarah and Robert visited us a few days ago and Sarah suggested we make a mural about what we want 2019 to be about together. I felt so grateful to her. We would never have done it on our own; we are all, I think, in our own ways, afraid of the future. Better to avoid considering it too much. But instead there we were with paints and crayons and markers sitting around a long piece of brown butcher paper unrolled on the kitchen floor, nudging the cats out of the way. It slowly filled with trees, leaping dolphins, handsome men, starry skies, cats, mountains, yogis, cups running over, mandalas, flowers, more cats.

And one narwhal.

I treasure Beatrice's narwhal. I delight in it. It was the first thing she drew, a creature both magical and real.

A narwhal is so improbable. Just like enjoying going to the movies in the midst of this sorrow, or laughing and crying over fancy drinks with Robert and Sarah in a new dress purchased with Heather in New Orleans earlier this month, or an amazing, wild mural hanging on the front of this house that Mike never lived in illustrating the beauty and love that awaits us in 2019.

2019, a year that terrifies me.

2019, the year of the narwhal.

win-lose

Tonight I am taking Gabriel to meet a new guitar teacher. He happens to play in a band with a gentle and poetic sensibility, which seems a good fit for my big-hearted boy (or at the very least a good fit for my big-hearted feelings about my big-hearted boy).

Mike and I listened to one of their albums, Befriended, over and over during the 2004-2005 academic year, driving in my dad's old Nissan Altima between our home in Germantown and our schools in Villanova and Bryn Mawr. I graduated with my social work degree in May, and gave birth to Frances in June. That album is the soundtrack to a tender time of growing into parenthood, saying goodbye to our life without children as it had been, and welcoming with not a little trepidation an unknown way of life that would be dedicated to an unknown person. I remember sitting in a parking lot near Bryn Mawr's library, settled in the Altima's passenger seat with my feet propped on the pale glove compartment door, watching sunlight filtered through moving trees overhead play on the windshield, feeling Mike next to me in the driver's seat, letting a song finish before I broke the magic space of the car to pick up a book I needed, my heart aching with a kind of love-anguish, my baby's feet digging up underneath my ribs.

Nobody knows, darling. Nobody knows how they are loved. 
Don't worry my darling, the sun's coming up. 

My baby didn't know how blasted open our hearts already were.

In those days I was seeing an outside supervisor to help me with my field practice. I went to her because I felt like a complete failure, a useless deer in the headlights during my therapy sessions. I was devastated by how surprisingly ill-suited to psychotherapy I seemed to be. I started crying whenever I talked about it, which made my on-site supervisor begin to question the whole arrangement, which made me cry more.

Rochelle did not make me cry. She definitely made me laugh. Her office was in Chestnut Hill, and felt like a very well lived in living room, full of overstuffed pillows and books and battered furniture from decades past. The first time I knocked on her door she hollered 'Come on in! I can't get up!' and sure enough, as I cautiously peered in and scanned the room looking for her, my eyes lit on a 70-something woman wearing brilliant fuschia lipstick sitting in a wingback chair with her foot, set in some kind of orthopedic contraption, propped on a pile of blankets that slid around on an ottoman as she moved, which she did when she talked, thus requiring frequent tending, smiling and beckoning with sweeping arms for me to stop hesitating at the door and come in already.

How I loved her. We talked about my fieldwork for maybe 12 minutes over the hours that I met with her. Mostly what I remember talking about is the sense of loss I felt as my body moved closer and closer to giving birth. I told her my fear that what Mike and I liked to do most over the course of a leisurely evening - cook, listen to music, eat, drink wine, talk and talk and talk, and talk some more, and then be quiet and listen to music, and then talk again - would never happen again, once this baby arrived. We would only pay attention to it. We would never have the space and freedom to be together in that way again.

She leaned forward in her chair, hovering over that boot. She nodded and clucked and made a lot of empathetic noises; she smiled often. Rochelle had heavy plastic-framed glasses that made her eyes seem even bigger than they were. She told me of course you're worried about that; she told me don't worry about that. She told me that she and her husband liked to do that best, too, and that it didn't stop when they had kids. She told me we would always be us, even though we would also be forever transformed by parenthood.

She spoke personally, warmly, with an authenticity that I soaked up and took a lot of comfort in. We ended up focusing on the transition I was in the middle of, but now that I look back, I can see that her example helped me with my field work more than any case review could have. I walked away knowing that I could be a therapist, and be myself while doing it - that that, in fact, would be ideal. I had been laboring under the notion that I had to act like a therapist, that is, back myself way up and out of the picture in order to put on a nice counselor face and say all the right things and have lots of amazing insights. Rochelle taught me that I could just be present and real, and the rest of it would flow from that.

I would go home to our cozy apartment on the third floor of an old stone house on Germantown Avenue, and tell Mike while we washed dishes in the galley kitchen with a black and white checkerboard linoleum floor that glowed beneath the overhead light and an enormous warped window that opened to the lush treetops from the estate of the historic home next door, Rochelle says it'll be okay. She says we will still be us. I'd offer this information with a little smile and tone that suggested I knew that Mike did not in fact recognize the Authority of Rochelle but I wanted to tell him anyway, so he would know it was reassuring to me at the very least.

We slept then in a double bed, with an iron frame painted white that came from my family. Frances sleeps in it now. Over twenty years of spooning with Mike, I was always on the outside, and that was true throughout my pregnancy too. Somehow my huge belly still fit just right (though that bottom arm was/is always such a problem - where to tuck it, without it falling asleep?) and the baby always seemed to start practicing martial arts, or acrobatics, or driving a truck, or whatever it was she did in there, just as I would lie down to go to sleep. So it became a routine at night, to snuggle up next to Mike, happy in anticipation of the baby kicking me and through me, him. She threw little punches that landed square on his back. We would lie there smiling in the dark, feeling her shake things up.

I played the Innocence Mission for Gabriel this morning and I thought of all those times. I thought of the bittersweet tenderness that a you-can-never-go-back change ripples through a person, a family.

We were very happy; we were very sad. In the spring we made plans to leave Philly. Mike made plans to leave academia. I began to make plans to find my first social work job. The baby would come, and everything would change.

Earlier this week I was supposed to have lunch with a new friend who is also going through a terrible loss. She works near me, and because we had to cancel the lunch, I asked if I could run up to her office just to give her a quick hug. I took the outdoor stairs leading to her part of the building, hearing my steps echoing on the metal, feeling the cold emanating from the railing. It was a crisp, sunny day but in the shade of the stairwell it was awfully cold.

Then at the top I stepped into a patch of dazzling light and it felt just marvelous, the warm sun on my cold cheek. I closed my eyes. The light and warmth penetrated my eyelids, so unexpected, so gentle, such a contrast to cold metal and shade. Was it a minute? Thirty seconds? I didn't stand there long, but it was long enough to begin to relax into the brightness. Finally I stepped across the landing towards the building, back through shade, and felt the temperature drop again what might have been fifteen degrees, back to a land of bracing oneself against the elements, rather than inviting them in, as I had a moment earlier.

Moving from sun to shade is so dramatic, especially in the height of summer, when the sun can feel like a relentless beast pushing down on you and the shade offers gentle respite. Now in this cold, dark season, the sunlight is a precious gift. The color of the whole day can change, depending on where you're standing.

Sometimes that's what grief is like. Frances calls it a grief attack, when you're tooling along as best you can, fairly steady, and suddenly you're knocked off your feet by acute sorrow. You're in the winter sun, doing just fine, letting your guard down, and then suddenly, without warning, find yourself in the shade, shivering.

As we approach Christmas, for me the grief is more like holding the sun and the darkness simultaneously, all the time. The warmer it gets, the colder it gets. The more delighted I am by the children and the more zany their holiday energy, the more devastated I am by Mike's absence. The more beautiful our tree, the more heartbreaking our tree. The more "normally" I am able to move through a day, the more alien I feel.

A few days ago I went out to our garage and used my very fussy elliptical trainer. It was procured by loving friends as a response to my perceived predicament back in early March - it seemed then that I would be bringing Mike home on hospice care, in charge of suctioning his tracheostomy and managing his feeding tube and basically continuing to live out our days in an increasingly intense and demanding caregiving role. I'm the kind of person - or at least through this experience I became the kind of person - who starts to lose any semblance of emotional balance if I can't sweat at least every couple of days. And it didn't seem like leaving the house would be in my future for quite awhile. Hence, a big beautiful piece of machinery was moved into my house while I was at the hospital with Mike, and now lives in the corner of my new garage.

Anyway. I had half an hour (a win), and the elliptical was working (another win), and I watched part of an episode of the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Mike's iPad (yet another win, figuring out how to download a show in order to play it later, the kind of thing that was Mike's job, not mine), and it was funny. When I was done, fueled by a sparkling ripple of endorphins and good jokes, I did a little dance as I hopped off. I kept doing my funny happy dance on the way to the garage door, before I had to open it and start acting like a more sedate adult again in my urban, exposed backyard. With my hand on the doorknob, waiting for my hips to settle down, I suddenly had this thought: this is my garage. I bought this garage. This is my house!

I laughed out loud. It was the first time I felt that way - pride in having pulled it together and bought a house - a house with a garage! no way! - and happiness in my accomplishment and excitement over all I wanted to do to keep making it feel like our home.

A minute later I sobbed. The warmer it gets, the colder it gets. I told a friend about feeling that surprising rush of happiness later in the day, and cried again with her.

But I can take it. At least for today, I'm game. If I open myself up to joy, I know what comes with it. I know the deal. It's okay. Nothing is the same, there's no use in pretending. Nothing is just good. It is all bittersweet, not unlike those days when we teetered on the edge of the abyss of parenthood, holding hands.

As my new friend and I observed, once I finally made it inside and found her office, nothing is win-win anymore. It's either win-lose, or lose-lose. If you don't give yourself permission to register the wins, or make space for them, then it will be lose-lose all the time. Maybe a slightly muted, muffled, numb sort of lose, as compared to the win-lose lose, which really fucking hurts, but it's all lose all the same. Might as well go for the wins when you can.

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.