march mudness

I said goodbye to Beatrice and Gabriel a little over an hour ago. It's spring break this week, and they're off to spend a few days with their grandparents while Frances is in Spain with my mom. My in-laws graciously offered to host them, knowing I was having a hard time figuring out child care, and I figured the kids would be happy to go. I think they were inititally, but Beatrice sobbed for the half hour leading up to their departure, clinging to me and repeating "I'm not going, I'm not leaving you" over and over, her growing-out bangs freed from their bobby pins and skirting her runny nose, her big adult tooth just visible, pushing insistently through her top gums and advertising to anyone who glances in her direction that this little girl is growing up, quick.

I haven't had to disentangle myself from a weeping child who can't bear to be separated in a long time. It's misery. Especially the part where I have to stay calm and reassuring and proceed with the parting as if everything is okay, when inside I want to cry too, and my mind is quickly running through improbable scenarios that make no sense at all: could she watch movies all day long and not make a sound in a nearby office while I see clients? Could I call everyone I know, pleading for a babysitter? Could I take off the rest of the week?

I knew none of those options made much sense, and I knew that my in-laws are more resilient and peaceful than I am in the face of these situations and that eventually everyone would settle in and have a fine time. So in the end I smiled and waved them off in the yellow evening light.

Then everything was quiet, and still, and I felt wretched. What now? I found some scissors and cut down Beatrice's shriveled birthday balloons that had been hanging from a string tied around the porch railing for almost a month. I pulled in the recycling bin from the curb. I stood on my porch, empty.

When Mike died, I comforted myself with reminders that we had had the chance to say everything that needed to be said. There wasn't anything important that didn't get articulated; I felt we were together, transparent, united. I told him he was the very best husband for me, and he knew it was true. He said you know how much I love you just before he died, and I did. I do. But now it turns out there are so many things that are important to say to him, and to hear from him, and I can't. Was it the right thing to send them to your parents this week? What should I do about Beatrice being so quick to hit when she's mad? And how should I handle this phone business with Frances? Is it okay that I let Gabriel run the neighborhood til the evening, and sometimes he's late coming home, and I don't make a big deal out of it?

And the sweetest thing happened this morning, snuggling with Bea. And I feel overwhelmed at work sometimes and I'm not sure how to get on top of all the documentation. And what do you think I should do this summer to ensure time for myself, for writing, for remembering who I am?

And also, Mike, who am I, exactly? Would you remind me?

This year has been an exercise in tolerating disorientation, in mucking haphazard trails through mud. March's gray days and raw weather exacerbate it all. My dad died in March. Mike died in March. Mike's Aunt Joan, his godmother, died nearly two weeks ago; I went to her funeral last week and sat alone in the pew, missing Mike's arm grazing mine. I was able to visit her in the hospital the day before she died, for which I am so very grateful. But it's one more tether snapped; one more precious person I can no longer see and no longer be seen by. What roots me to this singular life? It's bewildering.

I had no idea how completely I had lived as part of a unit until Mike died. I thought I was so independent! But there wasn't anything that I didn't take him into consideration before pursuing, or rejecting, or working around. The rhythms of his speech, the turn of his thinking, his particular style, the things that made him uncomfortable, his outrageously good sense of humor. These reached out towards me and met my own thinking halfway, so that I was never in free fall - for better or worse - but always rather in conversation, even when nothing was said aloud or explicitly discussed. We didn't always agree - in fact, in more recent years, we disagreed more than ever - but it isn't about a unilateral vision. It's about a kind of receptivity and awareness that is so intimate as to be part of one's own internal landscape.

And now? Now I have lost the cadence we used to share. Literally. I know I have. A friend used to always comment on it - a little funny way we both had of speaking. Without my partner to reinforce the rhythm it no longer fills my mouth.

I find myself looking back to the time before I met Mike. Who was I then? There is a lot I don't like about me at nineteen. I could be so fearful, so tentative. I yearned for authenticity of relationship, ideas, expression, but I didn't trust myself to act on those ambitions, or be able to fulfill them. I danced, uncertain of my right to claim space in class and onstage. I was beginning to practice yoga. I missed my dad terribly; it marked me. Sometimes I wrote a good paper. I loved reading always, and found myself most easily in stories. I liked being a religion major. My friends and my family were the most important thing; I delighted in cooking for them, feeding them. I wasn't good at being honest when there was even a whiff of conflict involved. I was already pulling away from my Unitarian Universalist identity, though always (and still) grateful for the nurturing community it afforded me. In those days I yearned for the lush green forest of my UU camp in North Carolina all year long.

So it's interesting that I've been taking ballet class and taking the children to see dance performances.  And hoping to claim time for writing this summer. Dreaming of Gabriel's birthday cake. Planning a trip to North Carolina. I do love those things, still. I encounter them now in a way that is different than I would were Mike still alive. That's uncomfortable, necessarily touched by ambivalence, but one continues reaching for things that are good and true anyway.

And it's not like it's all misery in this mud; I had a great time on the big slide at the park with Beatrice before dinner tonight, we saw friends in New York over the weekend, I love my work and laugh with my colleagues over lunch. There's room for joy. Plenty of joy! But also, one year later, it seems worth pointing out that time heals nothing. The wounds just keep gaping. I think tending to them, and living with the strangeness and discomfort the pain of them brings, is the best we can do. The tending might eventually - one hopes - have a healing effect. With sustained tender attention, the wounds might not gape quite so raw and wide, such that every passing snag won't rip them open all over again.

So when will I write about something else? Honestly, I don't know. Feeling and voicing these feelings seems like what I have to do right now, even though it's a discouragingly self-centered enterprise and often I'd just rather not. 

My oldest child is in Europe, my other children just drove away, and instead of the thrill I had anticipated - time alone to do with as I like! - I feel a quiet terror. Without them, the disorientation threatens to overwhelm. I realize how much I need them to remind me of the part of me that has been consistent and present and unfailing since the day Frances was born nearly fourteen years ago. Even without Mike, even in the grip of grief, I will always be their mother. Thank goodness.

Beyond that? It's all gaping wounds and brilliant evening light, loneliness and gratitude, gray days and stubborn daffodils. March mud, as far as the eye can see.

day 355

When you are grieving someone to whom you have given your whole heart, just about any old stupid pop song has the potential to bring you to your knees. It doesn't even have to be any good. You don't even have to like it. A truly excellent song can do much worse though, breaking your heart in two all over again, though the pain of it may only last for the duration of the song.

The children are all out with friends. I put on Shovels and Rope as loud as my little speaker could sing and set about tackling some of the least palatable Saturday afternoon kitchen chores imaginable: scraping the cooked-on layer of powdered sugar that flew in wild billowing clouds from the stand mixer when I was making the frosting for Bea's birthday cake yesterday off the stovetop, cleaning the layer of sticky honey off the shelf where it spilled (along with the bottoms of all the objects on said shelf).

It fucking sucks to be the only responsible adult in this house.

Anyway. Once upon a time I heard Shovels and Rope (which is, incidentally, a marvelous band) performing on the NPR show that used to be Prairie Home Companion but is now called something else, something forgettable, hosted by a sometimes annoying but mostly just fine impressively musical much younger man than Garrison Keilor, and they sang this song that took my breath away. The new host reacted the way I felt afterwards and I liked him a little better. And I tried to remember it later to tell Mike about it, because I wanted him to hear it too, because we both love this band, and he was sick, and it would comfort and sadden him as it did me, and he would know just how I felt listening to it. Of course later I couldn't remember any of the lyrics to figure out the name of the song and was quickly distracted and that was that. As far as I know he never did hear it.

I listened to it again this afternoon on the kitchen floor. St. Anne's Parade.

And I'm up too damn early in the morning
Watching the world around me come alive
And I need more fingers to count the ones I love
This life might be too good to survive.
...
We've been riding down this highway now for all these years
Breathing in the dust along the way
But it's the kindness of a friend is what's remembered in the end
It's a debt that is a pleasure to repay

And it never feels like we're getting any older
But the memories build up around the eyes
And I need more fingers than I've got on my two hands
This life may be too good to survive. 

I miss hearing a song sung from the perspective of a we and having the other part of my we be alive. Widowhood is as lonely as fuck.

It's March. Ten days and counting. Life keeps happening. The snow arrives, the bits on the sidewalks freeze and melt and freeze again, various children are ill, my clients are strange and wonderful, I make dinner, I cry with a friend, I laugh with a friend, I swear more than usual, I lie awake at night all over again. What will happen when the sun rises the day after March 12th, 2019? What will the world look like when Mike has been dead for one year and a day? Probably a lot like it does on this slushy gray afternoon: big and beautiful and empty.

We will have survived a year of firsts without him; a year of seconds will be lying in wait.

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.