the fair and the show

Every May there is a fair down the street at Buchanan Park, and every year that we've been here since we arrived in the wake of Mike's diagnosis I have taken the kids on Wednesday night, the first night, when good vibes abound and the whole neighborhood hits the cotton candy and the scrambler and walks home with little flashing goldfish who may live one night or a thousand in clear plastic containers. One year Mike was well enough to come along and squeezed into a couple of kiddie rides with Bea. This year, I got home from work just as Gabriel was returning home from his guitar lesson. He wolfed down a snack and ran out the door to meet his friends. Frances was at a school event and made it there much later. I picked up Beatrice from ballet at six, brought her home to change, and then walked down towards the lights and music.

Recently Beatrice asked me, have you noticed how I'm afraid of everything lately? Did you notice that I always have to call for you and ask you where you are when we're at home, even if I know you just went into the bathroom? Yes, I have noticed that, I said. I think it's why I can't fall asleep at night, she added. I'm too scared.

She clings and pulls on my arm when we go places with so much ferocity that it hurts. She digs her nails into my hands. I've taken to walking next to her with my arms resting on my head so she can't yank. At the fair it was no different. She wanted to go on the ferris wheel like we did last year, and as the line inched us towards the the benches that slowly descended, swinging gently, she clung harder and harder. When we got on, she squeezed my hands and immediately begged me to take her off. At the top she screamed to be let off. I convinced her to stay and give it a try; she managed to stop screaming, but it wasn't easy.

I had bought her a wristband so she could ride as many rides as she wanted. We walked all around the fair, stopping to say hi to friends, taking in everything, deciding what would be fun to try. I would spot Gabriel sprinting by with his friends every now and then. The more we looked around, the more tightly Bea clung. She pulled me in this direction and that; she rejected every suggestion with increasing anxiety. I was getting so irritated. I had to continually pull my arm away from her. Come on. This is fun. This is the fair! So many of our friends are here, enjoying themselves! We can too.

But she couldn't. Nothing was right. Everything was scary. I tried to get her to try the teacups with her brother, who I had somehow pinned down for the moment.

No no no. Only you.

But I'll throw up if I ride the tea cups, I explained. Gabriel won't.

But I only want you.

I felt exasperated. I stood in the middle of the fair and looked at Bea with her missing teeth, her dirty feet in plastic flip flops, her big pleading eyes, and some stubborn angry part of myself abruptly gave way. I asked her what snack we should get.

She lit up. Kettle corn!!

I bought a big bag. We walked out of the fair, into the quieter park that surrounded it, and decided to sit under a tree just on the periphery of the action. We settled on the damp grass as darkness fell, Beatrice finally relaxed and leaning against me, sharing an open bag of sweet and salty popcorn and watching unseen as our friends and neighbors walked in and out of the fairground. She said, Mama, this is the best part of the fair. I'm having such a good time with you.

I smiled. It definitely was. It was as if I finally accepted that we don't quite belong in the midst of all those lights and games and happy families. Rather than force our participation in something that felt wrong, we took our place in the dusky outer edge. I watched with a kind of contented sadness as couples we know whose children are off at college walked by hand in hand, aglow with nostalgia for fairs gone by, and younger families we know wrangled their exhausted toddlers into strollers, and all of it was happening over there, lit up by the rides and games, away from us, sitting among the safe, sturdy roots of a very old tree in the dark.

It makes me think of Lear.

No, no, no, no! Come, let’s away to prison.

10We two alone will sing like birds i' th' cage.

When thou dost ask me blessing, I’ll kneel down

And ask of thee forgiveness. So we’ll live,

And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh

At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues

15Talk of court news, and we’ll talk with them too—

Who loses and who wins, who’s in, who’s out—

And take upon ’s the mystery of things

As if we were God’s spies. And we’ll wear out

In a walled prison packs and sects of great ones

20That ebb and flow by the moon.

When you are grieving you are God's spy, sitting apart in your prison, watching it all go by, knowing you are no longer a part of court happenings as you once were but somehow closer to the mystery of things. That kettle corn was my offering, my way of kneeling down and asking Beatrice's forgiveness, so we could nestle together on our perch and watch the stories unfolding below.

There's so much I want to do. I get frustrated with her anxiety and fear, her clinging, along with the weight of all my children's grief, the million things I haven't done - the emails I've neglected and plants I haven't watered and milk I haven't bought - the enormity of tending this family without Mike while my heart is so broken. I long to go to this party, that play, a retreat on Sunday, a yoga class, a drink with a friend, the couch with a book, a manicure, a concert. So little of it happens. My kids need me. Maybe I need me too. My golden birdcage prison calls me: come inside, you don't really belong in that world anyway, you feel alien and strange at the art show, the fair. Come snuggle with Beatrice and Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, give her your arm, accept the confines of this new life.

Tonight was the school art show. It's a wonderful event, full of art and music and friends. Frances performed. I volunteered at the snack table (after hearing repeatedly how I am the *only* parent that doesn't volunteer at school) and when there was a lull in the action, I wandered the show and took pictures of the kids' art boards. It was a habit. I had always texted them to Mike, who never seemed to be well enough for this event and would be waiting for us at home.

After I took the photos I realized with dismay that I had no one to send them to. I wandered back to my post. I felt lost and tried to busy myself. I thought about sending them to a friend but that seemed lame. A man introduced himself to me, explaining we had gone to high school together. It took me a minute, but I recognized him. His daughter is in Beatrice's class. I smiled and chatted and felt that my lostness - my questionable departure from my prison cage - was as obvious as if I had busted handcuffs dangling from my wrists. Yeah, we went to high school together, we're both pretty nice people, we have six year old daughters, we're both forty-one years old, but I belong back in my cage with my grieving freaked out little girl while you are at your ease in this beautiful room with your wife and your health and your plans to go out for ice cream after the art show.

Then Beatrice, the grieving girl in question, tore past, deep in a game with her friends from school, shrieking and sweaty. Unlike her mother, she didn't look like an escaped convict at all.

Afterwards Frances went to a friend's house and Gabriel was out playing Magic so it was just the two of us again, reading in bed, when we heard booms and crackles outside. We opened the door to the upper balcony off her bedroom and sat outside, Beatrice nestled on my lap, watching the fireworks being set off at the fair down the street. We had a perfect view up there. It was beautiful.

private eyes

I wonder if the appeal of the grief memoir is the access it provides to the inner workings of a marriage. Mourning affords a particularly raw clarity, and a freshly unmoored, cracked-open ability to articulate observations and thoughts that could only murkily take shape prior to the beloved's death.

At least that's what I imagine. I'm afraid to read any of those books now; I can barely contain my own story, so I can't quite convince myself that it would be a good thing to inhabit someone else's sorrow. When Mike was very sick he often reflected with some disappointment on how little appeal fiction held for him; at the worst times he simply had no room for other people's stories. Now I am in my own sickness, my own inward turn, and to others' gentle inquiries about whether I've read this grief-related memoir or that grief-related movie I can only say no, not yet. Maybe later. 

I don't want those narratives to crowd my loneliness. I don't want to know our story is like everyone else's. I want Mike and me and our family and all that happened to be ours and ours alone. It's so weird. Early widowhood does make me feel darkly special, set apart. Marked. I can no longer partake in "normal" life and I stubbornly refuse any story that promises to normalize this strange peripheral life I now move within.

Back to marriage. My relationship with Mike was the most private relationship in my life; I rarely reflected about it to anyone but him. I had my own unuttered thoughts about it, oddly-shaped pieces of furniture that I would occasionally scrape along the floor of the dark room of my mind to try them out from different angles. Sometimes I would catch a new shape in the dimness, but since I only ever talked about it with myself or with Mike it remained set apart from the rest of life. When it came to everything else - jobs and children and vacations and everyday challenges - I'd talk with trusted friends and family, which is like opening the blinds in the dark room, so that one realizes what you thought was a lumpy ottoman is in fact a pile of laundry. Oh! I see now. That didn't happen when it came to my most intimate relationship, my marriage. It was so very intimate as to be hard to pull out into the light and objectify and ponder about; so very private that I kept it private from myself. A marriage is unknowable to outsiders; maybe it is to insiders too.

Which is interesting, since my relationship with Mike, the least public part of me, was the central place from whence everything else flowed. The context in which all the tiny details of my days and nights took place. I didn't know that, not really, while he was still alive. I could linger in bed in the mornings and tempt a return to sleep because I knew morning-person Mike would get restless, eager for the day, and kick me out. I could live in blessed ignorance of the tax code because I knew he would take responsibility for our financial decisions. I could read one more chapter to the children without checking the hour because I knew he'd tell us when it was bedtime. I could let certain parts of myself lean off kilter without giving it any thought - our microdecisions that shift and move beneath thought - because I could trust him to lean back in my direction as needed to maintain the balance.

I guess I did the same for him.

But a year after his death, it's not any easier making sense of who we were then, and who we are now.  In the months after he died I struggled with fears about us: did we do it alright? were we good to each other? did I take good care of him? did he feel how much I loved him? did I let him love me back? I felt so disoriented and lost, unable to ask him to reflect our reality back to me, with no one who really knew (because no one really can know) what our lives together had been. I still can't pull it out and examine it. Who we were is too deeply part of who I am to be understood with any real sense.

Over the weekend Beatrice wanted to go through the old videos to see Papa. I'm always up for this. Frances joined us and we all tacitly understood that we would stop looking through the photos and videos when we got to his diagnosis. We wanted to see Mike before. There are precious few videos with him; we were late smartphone adopters and both he and I were mostly interested in documenting the children. But the bits we have are treasures, a precious reminder to me. The cancer chapter was so long and at times harrowing, so beset by uncertainty. We were just doing the best we could to hang on. But before then? It was pretty good. Sure, we had our problems, but we were a pretty great family, with our brilliant little ones, our cheerful house, our big open yard, and my handsome, funny husband and his powerful sensibility, quietly framing it all.

I've joked to a couple of friends lately that I'm knee-deep in the self-pitying stage of grief. Ha ha ha! I'm a resentful wreck! I seem to be surrounded at soccer games and school performances and church and the playground all the time with pretty great families comprised of two healthy parents and their beautiful children. When I see them walking hand in hand across a sports field, or sitting shoulder to shoulder in the auditorium, sometimes my mind automatically spits out (and maybe my lips too, I can't always be sure): Fuckers.

I do that. I really do. I walk by innocent young families out on a spring Sunday with their babies and dogs and nice shiny sunglasses and I think those fuckers. Then I think, for like half a second, good lord what has happened to me? And then I go right back to my husband isn't alive and they are and have absolutely no fucking clue what this is like. They get to have happiness, contentment, complaints about work schedules and who does the dishes, they get easy conversation with other parents standing around the slide, complaining about how hard it is to find time for a date night. They get to pass for normal, whereas I feel myself teetering under the weight of a big invisible neon sign on my forehead that reads: BEWARE! Bitter widow representing the fragility of all you hold dear! Look away! RUN while you CAN.

Yesterday I myself went running. To the cemetery. I haven't been running in a long time - the cold and damp scares me off - and I was happy to once again be moving over cracked sidewalks, through sun and shade, heading towards Mike and a place where I can take off that damn sign, where I can reenter the mysterious unknowability of my love for him and his love for me without anyone else around. It was hilly and I was tired by the time I entered the iron gates and headed up the gravely path towards his gravesite. Even so, I sprinted up the last grassy hill until I collapsed at his birdbath, leaning over the bowl of it, gasping and crying with relief. I'm here. 

After a few moments I sat in the grass and leaned against it. That's when I saw a young couple walking about a hundred yards off. The dad was wearing a Babybjorn, his newborn's chubby legs dangling in the air helplessly. They were happy, goofing around, taking selfies and pictures of each other on their cheery cemetery stroll. They settled down in the grass at the bottom of my hill to sit and have a breezy chat.

Seriously? I stared at them, all tear-streaked and snotty and sweaty. Didn't they hear me keening just now? Couldn't they have a bit more respect, give a widow a wider berth?

Mike, can you believe these two?

Alive Mike said, I can't. You've got to be kidding me. Get those awful people out of here.

Dead Mike said, Meagan, give them some slack. It's a beautiful day. You love this spot too. We were new parents once.

So I walked in the adjacent barren corn field, and wandered into the bordering woods, and down to the stream within that will be impossible to access a month from now when the undergrowth is thorny and thick. All was green and spare. I crossed back into the cemetery and the young family was still there.

I walked back up to Mike's grave, and sat with Dead Mike a little longer, letting his gentler spirit stir some part of me that I don't really understand. Alive Mike and Dead Mike do have this in common: they're both usually right. That quality could be infuriating, especially when it came to Mike's crazy accurate recall, rhetorical powers, and philosophical sophistication. But now I'm thinking of my husband's keen psychological sense, an attunement to when I (and most anyone we knew) was avoiding something or putting up a wall of anger or focusing on someone else rather than admitting to my own hurt feelings. He wasn't afraid to tell the truth, and he had a gleaming, precise way of communicating that got right down to the issue at hand.

Living and Dead Mike agreed. They aren't actually fuckers, Meagan. You're suffering and lonely and it hurts to see them. We can't begrudge them the pleasures of new parenthood, the obliviousness to the kind of loss you're staggering under. They'll face it someday. We all do. Let their joy live alongside your suffering without resentment. It's alright.

Oh Mike, I thought, you're so good. And right. Ugh. I still felt annoyed, but I no longer felt like those fuckers were brazenly stealing my visit. When I was ready, I ran right past them, all the way home.

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.