monkey business

This morning while hovering over my yoga mat, propped on my fingers, I proceeded to flop, scoot, and inch one leg out in front of me, descending into a rather inelegant, uncomfortable version of hanumanasana, which is fancy sanskrit talk for a split. I felt the weird nervy pinch in my hamstring that has been happening with discouraging regularity for the past year or so, making certain poses that used to be a comfort to fold into no longer accessible in the same way. Sliding into a close approximation of a split was something I used to do with relative ease and, I confess, not a little self-satisfaction. I may not know much, but at least I can do this. 

No longer! Maybe it will come back; maybe not. Maybe my forties will bring forth other party tricks I didn't even know I could do. Aging is so weird.

Anyway, I leaned over and wedged a block under my front thigh and tried to settle in. Not so much. I leaned over and found my blanket, fumbled with it for a minute, stacked that on top of my block, and tried again. As I fidgeted, everyone else in the class seemed to be breathing peacefully in hanumanasan stillness, and the teacher reminded us of the myth behind the pose: Hanuman is a Hindu monkey god, a symbol of great devotion, famous for his epic leaps performed in selfless service to Rama. In one story, he leaps from one island to another, all for love.

Then she said, four more deep breaths in this pose.

I started to cry.

Since Mike died the tears come in savasana with some regularity, but I rarely cry during the active part of a yoga class. Today, I noticed the sharp pain in the back of my thigh; my splayed, white fingers digging into the brick-colored mat on either side of my leg, attempting to relieve the burden of my thousand-pound hips; my spine trying to find length and then curling in on itself in exhausted defeat, and I knew I could not leap all the way from my island to Mike's island. I do not possess the courage and strength to make that single, graceful bound. I cannot bear the pain of it. I am no monkey goddess; my devotion falls short. I am an aging, imperfect human who used to be a wife and I need a stack of blocks just to tolerate four deep breaths in Hanuman's heroic pose.

It probably hurt Hanuman's legs to leap from one part of India to another. It probably hurt a lot. He may have had his own weird pinchy nerve pain. But he didn't dwell on it, because he was so focused on the object of his loving devotion.

I am afraid that I am not leaping towards Mike. Or rather I am afraid my leaps are heavy-footed, graceless; limited by my intolerance of pain, my distraction, my own self-pity. I am afraid they propel me no closer to my husband on his unknowable island. And I am afraid that if I don't reach for him, he will leave all over again. Cancer took him from me the first time. What if my failure to be a devoted widow takes him farther from me still?

I didn't know I was afraid of failing to hold Mike close until I started crying in hanumanasana.

Two days ago I found a box labeled "Mike's special items" in the basement. Since October, just after we moved, I had been attempting to look for that box, then panicking when I couldn't find it within minutes and abandoning the search, then trying again a week or two later. I felt sick whenever I considered that I didn't know where it was, but I felt sicker when I started looking for it. But then, miraculously, I found it over the weekend without even trying. I opened it on the kitchen table and there was his watch, his St. John's baseball cap, a handkerchief I had clumsily embroidered his initials on many years ago, his rosaries, his glasses. His glasses were smudged with oils from his hands and face. He was wearing them up until moments before he died and I had handled them very little since.

We had picked out those frames together while Frances and Gabriel waited patiently, slouched across a brown leather couch in an Annapolis optometrist's office, reading Harry Potter. I wasn't even pregnant with Beatrice yet. Mike wrung his hands over the expense. They were fancy. Danish. They looked fanstastic on him. I finally convinced him to elbow the frugal part of himself out of the way and just go for it. He was so handsome in them.

I took stock of those precious, intimate objects nestled together and I felt them all accuse me: you left us in a box. You didn't even know where we were. You haven't touched us in months! You are letting him slip away from you.

I put on his watch and put the rest of it back in the box and set it down next to my bed, uncertain how to honor these understandly angry treasures.

Long before he got sick, Mike was afraid that if tested, he would lack physical courage. He sometimes had nightmares about being in a foxhole, or a post-apocolyptic scene, or some kind of accident in which he needed superhuman strength and courage to save one of the kids. They were masculine anxiety dreams; murky, unconscious worries that he would falter when it came time to run inside a burning building.

But me, I worry more about my lack of spiritual courage. I'm afraid of God, or rather I'm afraid of looking too closely and discovering the frailty of my own heart before God. I'm afraid of the terribleness of my grief. I'm afraid of the pain inside. I'm afraid to take four deep breaths in hanumanasana.

Part of me knows I don't have to grasp and cling to Mike to keep his spirit with me. I've written here about how I learned that I needed to trust Mike's love for me when he lived on earth, and that I grew in that trust. Now I am being asked to trust my love for him and our love for each other. I suspect it isn't the kind of thing that will evaporate if I don't consciously revisit it, forcefully leaping towards the living Mike and our life together.  I suspect it isn't really up to me, in the end. Love just is, it can't be pushed and pulled, at least not with any peace.

I started going to an adult ballet class on Monday mornings. I hadn't taken a class since I was fifteen and was so nervous the first time I went, back in December. The teacher is wonderful. She is rather old and graceful. She dresses all in black, has beautiful posture, and wears her silver hair in a smooth, taut ponytail. I really want her to like me - or at least to tolerate my clumsiness and tendency to  grip the barre for dear life, the desperate tension evident in my wrists and knuckles as I try to get through a sequence of tondues. So when she approached yesterday before class got started and asked me about the chain of social connections that led me to her class, I basked in the attention. I explained who we had in common, how lucky it was that I'm off on Mondays, how I found my old slippers.

Everything is connected, she said.

Yes, I agreed.

She paused in thought, dropping her chin. Sometimes, she said, peering down at me over the tops of her black-framed glasses with a knowing look, it's unfortunate.

Is it ever. I bend my knees in a plie and my lower back hurts. I lie in corpse pose and cry. I see one of the children make a particular gesture and my knees buckle. Hanuman was trying to teach me today. Everything is connected. Sometimes it's unfortunate, because it's painful and awkward and imperfect and definitely not very pretty, and you think you can't tolerate it for one more breath. This contorted leap may be taking me, and the children, to new places, but it doesn't necessarily follow that we are leaving Mike in order to keep moving ahead. In fleeting moments, my heart knows that everything is connected, and love never ends.

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.