nice teeth

Another bit of Robert Alter's translation of the Hebrew Bible stopped me in my tracks a few days ago. This time I was reading Adam Gopnik's review in the New Yorker while I waited for Frances to come downstairs to go to the store with me.

(I should be clear about the circumstances facilitating these brushes with Biblical language, lest you think I am the kind of person who cozies up with a cup of tea and the five books of Moses on a Thursday night after our return from music lessons and the kitchen has been scrubbed clean, emails responded to, backpacks organized, and children tucked into their beds. No, after the kitchen is cleanish - a sad collection of glasses that didn't make it to the dishwasher are huddled together in the bottom of the sink and a pot or two is left "soaking," meaning I cannot bear to confront its cooked-on bits and am leaving it overnight for benevolent elves or more likely my fresher morning self to deal with, and I've said the final, dragged-out goodnights, long after ideal bedtimes have come and gone (Mike always asserted - in the face of bargaining and whining - that we don't negotiate with terrorists. But in his absence I do, Lord help me, I do), I favor the spell of Netflix while folding laundry, or scrolling through social media while feeling miserable and scratching behind one of the cat's ears, or going through old letters or emails or photos of Mike on the floor of my bedroom with tears in my eyes until I finally concede I am exhausted and crawl into bed. I put a Tessa Hadley novel on hold at my local libary a week ago, couldn't find the time or werewithal to pick it up, and realized this morning that I missed my chance. It has already slipped off the hold shelf and sunk back into the depths of the general collection. So I put it on hold again. That's what I call "reading" these days.)

Anyway. It was a metaphor from the famously hot and heavy Song of Songs, one of many illustrating the lover's face:

Your teeth like a flock of matched ewes
that have come up from the washing,
all of them alike,
and none has lost its young. 

I laughed out loud. Oh, Mike. Read this one. It's crazy sexy. Your teeth, like sheep. Like dripping wet sheep who just had a bath. Bring those sheep-teeth on over here, baby.  

Mike appreciated the weirdness of faith; he looked for the strangeness in Biblical language and loved it all the more for its unsettling phrasing. He liked to be caught unawares by an odd comparison or emphasis. He would have appreciated those lines. I would have read them out loud to him, or rather he would have read them to me; he read the New Yorker more thoroughly and promptly than I ever did.

But more even than the pleasure of imagining sharing the Song of Songs with Mike, I laughed - and cried a little too - because I love Mike's teeth. Yes, indeed! They are all alike, bright and square and strong, and though I would never have thought to compare them to a flock of ewes I would in fact compare them to a flock of something. A something that would never lose its young. A reliable, beautiful, consistent, precious something. I wish I could write an ode to Mike's teeth as extraordinary and strange as those lines in the Song of Songs.

I was talking to one of Mike's friends on the phone yesterday and sharing that I have been feeling at a loss at times with the kids; I fear I am letting them down on the parenting front. It isn't easy to know how best to support five, ten, and thirteen year old people when my time is more limited than I'd like, and they are facing the daunting developmental tasks of kindergarten, fifth grade, and middle school, of girlness and boyness, all while holding the burdens of sorrow and disorientation that necessarily come with losing their papa. I wish there was more of me to go around. I wish I knew what to do.

I wish Mike was here.

During his illness Mike often shared with me how powerless and sad he felt because he couldn't do normal dad things like pick up the kids at school, go to work, take them to a birthday party, have a game of catch. Once, around this time last year, after a long bedtime wrangle with Bea followed by fetching his medicine in the kitchen and filling his humidifier and finding more blankets I collapsed next to Mike in bed and he turned to me and said, it'll be so much easier for you. I knew he meant after he died. I told him nothing, nothing, nothing at all could possibly be easier without him. If he died, everything would be harder than I could bear.

Which was true.

When I don't know what to do about one of the kids, most of the time I can imagine what Mike would say. I can conjure his voice and sensibility. I can imagine the things he would do, based on our life before he was sick, and believe me, a little co-parenting would be AMAZING right now. I'd give my left arm to have one of those tense negotiations with Mike, splitting up pick-ups and drop-offs, deciding what to do with a scheduling conflict. Heck, I'd do anything for an early morning fight over who has to go into work late for a snow delay. Running a family is definitely way, way harder alone. But the difficulty lies not so much in the lack of a second driver who is also invested in soccer practice and piano lessons. The loss of Mike's insight and advice - excellent as they were - doesn't get to the heart of the thing either.

It's his being, not his doing, that I miss. The pain of his absence is what makes my knees buckle, and its really hard to get shit done when you're struggling to stand up.

Some of all this was part of that conversation with Mike's friend yesterday. It came up because he was being hard on himself for not doing enough when Mike was sick.

But you were there, I thought. You were with him. He was with you. If my experience of grief is teaching me anything, it is that the fact of one's being is the most precious thing of all. Our doings, in the end, aren't so very important. But it's hard to know that when death isn't pressing down on you.

I was pulled in so many directions when Mike was sick. There were so many concrete tasks to do. I don't get down on myself for being so busy then - I know it was just the nature of my path - but I do mourn the hours and hours I didn't stretch out next to him and listen to him think or sleep or cry and not say anything at all.

I don't need Mike to call one of the kids' teachers, or to tell me what to do in the face of some of the harder and more daunting parenting choices I need to make. He wouldn't know either. Who does, really? What I need is for him to be with me in the not-knowing.

How I long for his Mike-ness. His singularity. His teeth.

The elegant set of his jaw, which would become imperceptibly rigid when he was irritated. I would call him the Metal Man when that happened, a man with jaws of steel, which as you can imagine did nothing to melt the metal away.

His pale, surprisingly hairy, exquisitely unique feet. He called them his hooves. They were wide and short, with square toes and toenails. They were the utter opposite of my shockingly long, bony, brown feet. His hooves, my flippers. A ridiculous pairing of two pairs of feet.

His turn of phrase. His jokes. His surprising capacity to bust out the oldey timey hip hop moves, or a line memorized long before I met him, like basketball is my favorite sport/I like the way they dribble up and down the court, or both. His severity. His levity. His discernment, his psychological acuity, his comfort around children, his peacefulness in natural settings.

His clear eyes. I know that everyone, especially those we love best, has soul-window quality eyes, but it is possible that Mike Brogan's eyes were more extraordinary in this regard than most. They were steady and strong yet open and vulnerable, and possessed of a shifting air/water/sky color that I should not even attempt to describe. At our wedding Mike spoke his vows in a booming, unfaltering voice that I simply couldn't believe. How did he do that? When it was my turn I struggled to make any sound come out of my voice at all. Our priest was a little worried. But what I remember more than the sound of his voice is the look of his eyes, unafraid to meet mine, unafraid of anything at all, full of love and fidelity. A lifted eyebrow, a gaze that held mine, a subtle roll. Mike's eyes always said everything.

I know it's hard to believe, but I think if it is true for Mike, it's true for you, too.

Your weird habits, your limitations, the things you've done and the things you haven't done, the particular planes of your body, the way you sneeze - all of it amounts to a thousand things to love about you. How wonderful it is that you are.

kitchen re-do

On Thursday night, as I lingered over the goodnight routine with Gabriel, stretched out next to him on the bottom bunk in his cozy third floor bedroom as I am wont to do, we reviewed the events of the following day. I would drop him off at school in the morning, at which point we would say goodbye until tomorrow. He would go home with his friend after school for a sleepover, get dropped off in the morning at his basketball game, and then play with other friends. I would drive after work to meet a friend to enact a radical plan we had cooked up over the past month: a little overnight adventure in the wilds of Bel Air, Maryland, a site chosen for no reason other than it's convenient location midway between Lancaster, where I live, and Annapolis, where she lives and where we once lived, before the cancer came. So tomorrow night Gabriel would be here, and I would be there. Until lunchtime on Saturday.

But I'll miss you. Don't go.

You'll be having so much fun, I don't think you'll miss me much.

Don't go anyway, Mama.

Just think, you'll be at James's house! It's so nice there...and they have that great big kitchen...and didn't you say James loves cookies so they always make big batches of homemade cookies to have on hand? It's just that kind of house.

Yes. But when our kitchen is done, we'll always have cookies too, you know.

An aside: we've been working on choosing new flooring and paint colors for our kitchen. I want a brilliant green marmoleum floor and bright white cabinets. We have a fantastic helper on this project and are slowly and steadily moving towards execution of the vision. Even the kids have gotten into the selecting and planning.

It's the first time I've been able to feel simple excitement about something to do with this improbable house where my husband never lived. Every time a close friend visits us here I faux-casually ask if it feels like a place Mike Brogan would live. A place Mike Brogan would like to live. Does he fit here? Is there plenty of room for him to sprawl on the couch and read? They always say yes, of course, but I feel uneasy all the same. I do think he'd like my kitchen plans. Maybe that's why I can feel confident and happy about pursuing them.

But anyway. Back to our program:

Oh yes. Once the kitchen is just right, it will always be clean, and we'll always have cookies.

It will be magic, said Gabriel. When we have the new, nice kitchen, everything will be just right. The kittens will never scatter litter all over the floor or knock over the recycling. You won't ever find knives that aren't all the way clean in the silverware drawer.

There was a pause while he gazed up at the slats supporting the mattress above us, feeling around for the thread, in order to keep following. Then he picked it up and it slid quickly through his fingers.

Papa will still be alive. All our friends from Annapolis will move down the street. They can work at F&M.

Uncle Noel will buy Wendy Jo's just like we wanted him to, and they'll all move here too, and whenever he comes home from Market he'll drop off cookies on the front stoop. Like, you know there used to be a milk man, and a spot for him to leave the milk? Uncle Noel will be the cookie man. We'll have a box on the front porch. And we'll still live here but in a bigger house - not too big, not too big that you get lost, but big enough to really play in.

I felt so peaceful and close to my boy, envisioning a world that made perfect sense, watching it unfold from the bunk bed.

This sounds so good, Gabriel.

Yes, and Robert will actually live in our house. In some wing on the third floor that we never really use. And sometimes when you come down to the kitchen in the morning, he'll be sitting there in his bathrobe, drinking coffee and reading the paper.

I love that idea. He will be twirling the end of his moustache, quiet as a mouse, just waiting to say good morning.

And what else? Gabriel's old teacher will still be his teacher; his principal that retired will still be the principal. Many other far-away friends will move right to our block. Gabriel will no longer be a beginning guitar player; he'll be a guitar god, and we'll play music all the time. We'll host poker games and make big dinners and have a dog.

Everything lost will be restored. Everything distant will be close. The counters will gleam, and there will always be cookies.

Papa will still be alive. 

I think we were describing heaven.

hope and loss on a monday morning

Mondays are my day off.

On Monday mornings, I wake up, stretch, and in the still darkness of my bedroom I submit quite willingly to the day ahead with nary a protest: it's my day, after all, and all I've to do is get the kids up and ready for school before I can sink in and enjoy it. Even if it's a day of dentist appointments and grocery shopping and bill paying, I absolutely love it, because I get to do all those things alone.  I roam the house, pleasantly spinning my wheels, doing a chore here, opening a piece of mail there, skimming the two-day-old paper left on the kitchen table for a spell. I talk to Mike. I talk to the cats. I take a run. I take a long shower. And before I know it, it's 2:56 and time to rush out the door to pick up the children.

I could spend a week of Mondays like that, no problem.

But for the kids, Monday mornings are something else entirely. The agony is real. It's partly my fault, especially in Beatrice's case, because I often let her stay up too late on Sundays (we always seem to be sharing dinner with friends or doing something else that is worth pretending that she isn't due under the covers by eight o'clock for). Yesterday was no different. We had been to a raucous singalong/performance called Hamiltunes (everything you're imagining right now is spot on) the night before and the girl didn't even get home until ten.

I woke her up and she uttered a groan. She begged me to come back later. I turned on the light. She asked if I could bring her breakfast in her bed. I said how about I make your breakfast, and then let you know when it's ready? Which I did, and when I returned six minutes later to her room she was sound asleep again, drooling. Doesn't seem possible, but she was. When I woke her up again she cried helplessly. I knew I only had myself to blame.

After finally coaxing her to the kitchen and feeding her, she begged to have just a little snuggle time before she got dressed. The clock was ticking. My Monday awaited me. Feeling not a little ambivalent, I said okay.

We climbed on top of my bed, where she performed her customary snuggle voodoo with gentle nose digging and perfect cheek-to-shoulder fitting; her marvelous warm skin and her loopy yet astute conversation are like a siren's call. I should have strapped myself to the mast of the morning getting-ready-for-school routine, but I was beaten down by all that early morning wailing. She must know I fall under her spell and regularly stay in a snuggle longer than planned, even consider skipping whatever we're supposed to be doing next. Just a little snuggle time. Sure. 

So yesterday, after a few moments of settled quiet, Beatrice, who had been moaning with fatigue and the prospect of going to school moments before, pondered the ceiling for awhile before asking me a series of pointed questions: how did Jewishness and Christian-ness get started, anyway? Did someone invent being Christian? Who were the first people to be Jewish? Did they just decide to be that religion one day?

What an opening. I reminded her of the story of Abraham and Sarah, and we talked about how God called to Abraham, who just picked up and followed where God led, off to a new country. We talked about how God promised Abraham and Sarah countless descendants, as many as the stars in the sky, even though they were old at the time and had no children. Those stars would be the Jewish people. It was a miracle that Sarah had a baby when she was so old, but she did.

I was totally getting into the story. As you can imagine. It's such a good story! And I was kind of waiting for Beatrice to chime in with something awesome like, Mama, Grandma and you and we are those stars that God pointed out to Abraham! We are part of the story!

But she didn't say that. As I was telling her that Sarah was ninety years old when she had her baby Isaac, Beatrice interrupted.

Mama. That means you can have a baby!!

(Yep. Her takeaway was that her mother, an old wizened woman like Sarah, might also be singled out by God for such an honor. It happened once! You never know.)

Oh, but Beatrice. Even if getting older wasn't an issue, I don't have a husband anymore to have a baby with. 

So ... just get a new one!

Gabriel had wandered into the room and was sitting on the other side of my bed during the Abraham and Sarah story. Her suggestion snapped him out of his reverie.

Beatrice. Do you actually want Mama to remarry?

I started laughing and blurted out: and to have some ... some... man live in our house??

Gabriel layered on: some weird guy who sleeps here?

And then Beatrice caught the absurdity of it all, and started giggling and snorting as she took it even further: a guy with hairy armpits!!

That really cracked us up.

There has been so much press around Robert Alter's new translation of the Hebrew Bible that even I, on my scanty media diet, have encountered a handful of reviews and profiles and found reading about it to be completely compelling. One in the New York Times Magazine not too long ago used the language Alter chose around the episode of Sarah's laughter as an example of his translation process. I had always thought that her laughter was in response to the outrageousness of God's promise. A baby, me? Ha ha ha! Somehow her laughter seemed to speak of the improbable, surprising joy that would ripple out from her to her baby and her community.

But Alter's words suggest something else: Laughter has God made me,/Whoever hears will laugh at me.

Ever since I read that, which was before Beatrice asked me who decided to be the first Jew, I have been thinking about Sarah - a Sarah who might have been the object of laughter. I have been thinking about how her life must have looked as she approached the end of it, a woman whose worth in her time and place (as in most times and places) was measured in terms her fertility, especially her ability to birth a boy who would carry her family's legacy into the future.

She's so mean to Hagar. Were others mean to her? Did she miscarry, perhaps many times over? Was she lonely, isolated? Did she feel herself to exist on the periphery of her social world? Could she feel any safety, any power, in the role she inhabited before Isaac? Did her family and friends laugh at her?

Was it so bad that when God told her she would get the thing she had wanted for decades, the thing she must have given up for lost and mourned long ago, the thing that would have earned her the smiles of others rather than their laughter, bitterness surged because to hope after so much pain would be unbearable? Or did she simply brace herself for more laughter to come? A pregnant ninety year old woman is, after all, so improbable as to be laughable.

Sarah had never worn the easy mantle of a cisfamilied woman. She had always lived outside the norm.

Cisfamilied. Could it be a word? It describes the state I once enjoyed and never will again. I was a wife and mother in a mom-dad-kids 'normal' family, thoughtlessly partaking of all the privileges cisfamily-ness entails. Even messed up cisfamilies get to reap the social rewards of being 'normal.' Now I am a single widowed mom in a not-normal family. We have no dad to trot out at school and sports events. I can't ask my husband to stay home with the kids while I go out with friends. I can't ask him to consider a crazy late-in-life fourth baby. I am the lone single adult at the social gatherings I attend; everyone else is part of a couple. I take stock of wedding rings now: everyone in line at the grocery store, the people on either side of me in yoga class, my coworkers in a staff meeting. I notice my naked finger resting on the conference table.  I didn't know I was cisfamilied until my status changed.

But Sarah was never cisfamilied. She was a non-mother, and then she was a freak super-old mother. Maybe our foremother suffered terrible sadness, loss, doubt. She got her baby, and with him all those stars in the sky, but maybe it wasn't simple or easy to accept that gift. A lot happened at the end of her life. We haven't even mentioned the part where Abraham takes Isaac off with the intention of sacrificing him! Or when Sarah cruelly sends Hagar and Ishmael away. Or the heartbreaking joy that must have filled her as she held her tiny baby. At eighty-nine, could she have predicted any of it?

So obviously I'm not in a place to even consider loving another man someday. A strange man with hairy armpits walking around my house sounds about as improbable to me as a having a baby at ninety. Or forty-one. The preposterous and downright distasteful idea, there on my bed yesterday morning with Beatrice and Gabriel, made me laugh. Hard.

And yet, and yet, holding Sarah in my heart, the Sarah of before Isaac and the Sarah of after, I cannot help but wonder with just the tiniest flicker of hope: what impossible love might God have in store for me, for all of us? Right now it's a scorched field for as far as I can see; years upon years of dried-up barrenness, in every sense. We will never be 'normal' again, but I suspect there are a lot of rich, unexpected, creative ways to live out a not normal family life that we might discover. Extended travel? Creative endeavors? New friends? An adorable rescue dog named Arlo that I came way too close to bringing home from the pet store on Saturday?

Maybe, just maybe, the distant future holds a reality that is defined less by loss and pain, and more by abundant and generative love.

Hoping hurts. I do it anyway.

this is mean mama

Can there be a sound more threatening to whatever shreds of inner peace a mother manages to shelter in her fragile heart, a noise more deeply irritating, a noise more deeply saddening, than the escalating tit-for-tat music of her children bickering?

It's been harrowing around here. Beatrice, so much younger than her brother and sister and thus far less adept in the sophisticated eye-rolling and sarcasm department, has resorted to screaming the brutally direct phrase STOP IT the moment the tone shifts to a tiny bit combative, or worse, a tiny bit dismissive of the importance of her day to day activities and feelings. I would argue that this is a natural response to being objectified - treated explicitly as "cute" in a way ultimately intended to demean the cute person in question - though my older children would probably disagree. In any case, now the problem is so entrenched that I seem to hear Beatrice screaming at her brother and sister many, many times a day.

She screams at me, too.

On Sunday night I took Gabriel and Beatrice to the contemplative evening service at our church. Oh, what a very bad idea that was. Beatrice wriggled and whispered and pushed at her brother who insisted on claiming the lone meditation cushion (she periodically whined in a very audible stage whisper to me: he won't let me sit on the whoopee cushion, Mama!). He smiled triumphantly at her, chin high, wriggling himself more decidedly onto the cushion, while she was left with one of the boring meditation benches.

Truly, it was torture. The two of them could not break their bickering rhythm and most of the hour-long service was spent in either complete silence or silence while one person quietly spoke. But of course since we were there it was never silent. The children were pushing each other, taunting each other, leaning on me, pulling on my arms, softly groaning. In fits of frustration, I would occasionally stare at them and hiss STOP IT.

Wherever did Bea pick that up?

Anyhoo. Church finally ended, and we basically ran out of that chapel, into the welcoming embrace of the cold fresh air and evening street sounds. I was feeling brittle. Desperate. Mad at myself for thinking that that service was a good idea, mad at Gabriel for quietly taunting his sister, mad at Beatrice for being unable to sit still for more than thirty seconds. (I just can't stop moving my body right now, Mama!).

We drove back home and I tried to explain to Beatrice why she can't continually scream at her siblings and at me - incidentally have I ever mentioned that explaining ANYTHING of this sort to a five year old is usually a bad idea? - including the concept of being respectful to adults, and not talking back, and knowing that I, her mama, am most definitely in charge ALL the TIME. This went over as you'd expect. Talk about escalation. Our absurd conversation, if transcribed, would make you laugh. Heck, it might even make me laugh. But in the moment I was holding back tears and rage and had no perspective whatsoever. It was awful. I sent my black ship past her little gray rowboat in the dead of night again and again through gritted teeth to absolutely no effect, and in the end only worsened our fraying dynamic.

At home, we pulled up to the curb and I said, I need a minute.

Gabriel, who had been quiet the entire ride home, said, yes you do. C'mon, Beatrice.

So he and Beatrice got out and walked around the corner to my mom's house, where we were due for dinner. And as soon as the automatic minivan door slid shut I let loose a keen like no other, an ongoing rage/grief scream of epic proportions. Man, did it hurt. Like there was an alien lizard-like creature inside of me, and it was on fire, and it had to come out. The hard way.

Mike, Mike, Mike! Take these children. Tell them to stop it. Give me a break already. Exert some fucking authority, please, because apparently I have none. I need you here, being their papa, being my partner, the one person with whom I can wade through all this muck.

Finally I pulled it together - barely - and stiffly got out of the car. Just then I saw Frances coming down the dark street. At my mom's, Beatrice had started yelling at her (something about the wrong take out order, a miscommuncation on Frances's part that had struck Beatrice as a personal affront) and so she decided to leave. I can't take it. 

I know the feeling. But I convinced Frances to come back with me. Grandma had ordered us pizza! That was nice. It would be delicious. We can take it. Let's go.

We walked in, and the tension in the kitchen was worse than it was in the car. Things were looking more and more grim. Various people volunteered to leave, or rather escape, Beatrice began to cry and scream all over again, and louder still, because everyone was acting like she is too horrible to eat dinner with, and just as my mom poured me a glass of wine I took stock and decided to send Frances, Gabriel, and my mom to my house with a box of pizza. I told Beatrice she and I will stay, because it is time to Take a Break.

The dreaded time out! She protests. I put her on the couch. I pull up a stool in the open kitchen a few feet away, get my glass of wine, and open an old Martha Stewart Living magazine that is on the counter. Breath, breath, breath. Beatrice continues to bellow and writhe. This is a torment she cannot endure quietly. I continue to breath and look at the pretty pictures. The magazine is open to a little section showing Martha's calendar with her daily items listed in each square of the month.

Polish the silver.

I hate you, I hate you!

Make a delivery to a local food pantry.

You don't understand me at all!

Organize the wine cellar.

She slithers desperately off the couch and onto the floor. Why is everyone so mean???

Deadhead the roses, take dogs to be groomed, horseback ride.

I clung to Martha's orderly, waspy domestic dreamlife as tightly as I did the stem of my wineglass. Oh, to have but a single item on the daily to do list, and to have that item be wrap Japanese boxwoods with burlap.

I told Beatrice we wouldn't talk until her time out was over. My heart was pretty cold at that point; my eyes stayed fixed on the glossy paper shining beneath the yellow kitchen lights while my little girl wept and screamed in a manner not unlike my partial grief-demon exorcism in the car thirty minutes earlier. But my earth had been salted, nothing could live in there. In that moment, in my mom's kitchen, my highest hope was to endure the next few minutes. And then the next few after that.

And then, as faithful readers of this blog have probably already guessed, something good happened. Grace or a love demon or something moved me to the couch when her minutes were up, where I picked up my limp, red-faced girl, and found the strength to work things out with her. It wasn't easy. The talking was tough, and there were many more ships-in-the-night moments, but our vessels were slowly and surely cutting through waves towards a common point on the horizon. We did the work, together.

A friend in grad school taught me the phrase 'stay in the boat.' She learned it from a marriage counselor, who used it with clients to describe the goal of getting through times of conflict in a marriage. (It is such a useful concept that I feel certain I must have mentioned it here before). You can't step out of the boat and push it downstream and wave with a resentful frozen grin at your partner when the going gets painful. You have to stay in the boat together, tolerate the awfulness, until you find your way back to connection, to love. There's no hope of reconciliation for people who refuse to stay in the boat. When I was gazing at waspy fantasy chores and walling off my broken heart, feeling pushed past the capacity to empathize, I was sitting right on the teetering edge of the boat. It would have been so easy to slide off, wade through the water, and climb onto shore. See ya, Beatrice. Have a nice trip.

Instead, I fell back in. We got to the point where Beatrice told me that when she screams deep down she feels afraid. And sad. And that she would like it if I could speak quietly and nicely to her instead of being a mean mama in those moments, because she could feel better and probably calm down if I did.

And when I asked what to do about her siblings, who were feeling so hurt and angry, Beatrice said, remember the day that Papa died, how you and me and Gabriel and Didi got into Grandma's bed together and had a family snuggle for a long time? I would like to do that.

I think about Mike's death every day. I think about the hospital, and everything that happened before, during, and after he died. I think about it whether I choose to or not - my mind is compelled. My heart just barely tolerates the pain of it. But the very worst thing I've ever lived through happened a little later, and that was telling the kids. I can barely write that sentence. It is unbearable, unrevisitable. I cannot think about it at all.

Beatrice remembers though, and brought something beautiful from that pain right into an evening that I had thought was unredeemable. My girl wants to stay in the boat. So do I.

Love is real. Family snuggle it is.