green time

I would like to see time. 

Beatrice was in the back seat. I glanced at her in the mirror.

Not like seeing the future, I don't mean that. I mean what time is, what it looks like. Maybe it's a kind of ... greenish air.

Oh, yes, I said. I'd like to see that too. Maybe it's like ... water. Something you can't really hold, something that moves.

Maybe.

I sat at a familiar light, resting my hands on top of the steering wheel and enjoying a pleasantly fizzing excitement about where this imaginative, philosophical discussion with my six year old might lead. We were both quiet. My mind started reaching towards the mysteries of time and space, past and present, life and death.

Bea's voice suddenly ruptured the pregnant silence of the minivan. She had a new idea.

Mama, could you play It's Raining Tacos on your phone? Pleeeeeease? Or, wait, I know! Cat Flushing a Toilet!

The moment had already passed, as all do. Then I had to disappoint my girl because if I hear one of those autotuned monstrosities one more time I will have to run away to Australia, where children surely have better taste.

At the end of June, I drove us to North Carolina for a week. We met up with friends in the mountain town that is situated near my beloved UU camp that I went to in the summers growing up. My family spent time there too, as my dad would serve as minister for week-long family camps in between the youth camp sessions my sister and I would attend. I went most summers between age 9 - 17. My Mountain camp friends were precious to me, and many of us exchanged letters during the 50 weeks of the year that we weren't in camp together. I was a counselor the summer after my dad died, in 1996. I visited once more with college friends in the fall of 1997.

And that was it - until a few weeks ago.

We rented a house in the mountains with our friends. The last stretch of the drive seemed interminable. Everything in the car felt sticky. Bits of popcorn and crushed Pringles coated the floor mats. The children had driven each other and me insane after two days of being car-bound. When we finally arrived, I pulled into the gravel parking area, opened the door, and paused, feeling the green mountain air gently and insistently push all the accumulated stress of the drive, the irritation with my children, the uncertainty about where we were, and the worry over whether all of this was a good idea right off my shoulders, my back, my hips. The air passed in and over me and took most of that stuff along with it. I breathed deeply. It smelled exactly right. Like home.

The next day we met up with a dear old family friend at the Mountain. Lee is a folk musician and storyteller who has been river guiding on the Nantahala for forty years. My dad and Lee were particularly close. When I got out of the car at the Mountain and everything looked and felt just as it should, just as it always has, I felt my heart stretching, pushing at my sternum. I stepped with Lee, my children, and our friends out onto a place called Meditation Rock, where one is surrounded by the blue and gray and green mountains, the abundant sky, the spirits of those who came before us, and began to cry. It was so beautiful. I missed my dad.

Lee cried with me. He understood. Kit Howell! What a joy it was to be on Meditation Rock with you.

Our summer travels since Mike died (Vermont, Colorado, New England and New York last summer; North Carolina and New England this summer) are fraught for us. A year ago, I wanted to give my children all the things they couldn't have in the years Mike was sick. Adventure, freedom, travel, new formative experiences in beautiful places. It was hard though; we were still reeling, in pieces, grieving Mike and grieving the family we used to be, uncertain who or what we now were. I thought farflung adventures would help us figure that out, or at least help us to know that we still were a family, albeit deeply broken and diminished.

Did it? I'm not sure. I cried my way through most of those trips. I felt Mike's absence acutely in the places we went that he had loved. Vermont was heart breaking. Our Colorado river trip cracked open my grief in a terrible, scouring way; that canyon was big enough to hold the fathomless sadness coursing through me - and so much more - so it just kept pouring out. I barely slept; the space and the sorrow wouldn't let me. I was grateful to be there, but it wasn't easy (for me, or I suspect, anyone else close to me on that trip).

My last time at the Mountain was in 1997. I fell in love with Mike in 1998. He had never been there; we never visited. I had to acknowledge that I had stayed away from an incredibly special place for many years because Mike wasn't interested in going, and I wasn't interested in pushing the issue. It never even came up; I just knew he didn't want to go - for a number of complicated reasons - so I didn't ask. Last summer that realization would have made me sad, worried about the ways we let each other down in our marriage, but I'm okay with it now. We were imperfect people, doing our best to love each other in our imperfect marriage; certain priorities came to the fore in our shared life while others fell to the side. That's what happens. You build something together; you make choices.

The truth is I was grateful that we'd never been to the Mountain together. I didn't have to feel Mike's absence there in the way I had to in Vermont last summer; this was my place, my family's place, and I was full of relief to return to it, feel it's abiding hold on me. It's something I can bring along into this uncertain, unfolding future with my children. Being there knit the pre-Mike parts of me closer to the post-Mike parts of me. That whole week, seeing old friends and visiting special places, plunging into the shock of cold water at the base of a waterfall, navigating gentle rapids with my children, seeking daily ice cream cones, and sharing it all with friends who were seeing it for the first time tethered me to myself. Time felt like something palpable.

Our marriage was a tree. We sent our roots down into soil that our parents and grandparents and countless others that I will never know prepared for us, soil that our childhoods enriched, that our friendships made fertile. But the tree was us. Mike was my person, and I was his, and maybe this metaphor would work better with some entwined trunks imagery but I'm just going for it: one tree. One life we shared. We grew our careers and homes and children from that place of strength and connection. One's twenties and thirties are so full; in the scant time we each had for ourselves I might go to a yoga class or take a run or see a friend for a drink. Mike would pray or meditate, read a novel, take a walk. But those were the stolen hours, essential yet peripheral. Everything else was directed towards feeding the tree: meals together, plans for the kids, decisions about what to do with the garden and where to take a vacation.

Our tree was very beautiful. Its roots were complex and knotty and overlapping; it's branches were heavy with vibrant green in some seasons, bare and stark in others. The reality of the tree, it's weighty, undeniable aliveness, was never in question. For better and worse it was ours, it was us, it was ever-changing and yet ever-steady. The center we moved from. Even when Mike was sick in bed for days on end, unable to speak, the tree was undiminished.

When Mike died I felt as though our tree had been hit by lightning. The tree where I lived and the tree that was also me was destroyed. I was burnt and hollowed out and ashen. I didn't want to die, but I didn't know who or what I could be now, in this strange disorienting landscape: exposed to the elements, without strong leafy branches overhead.

Being at the Mountain felt like new life sprouting up through cracks in charred, blackened wood. The soil our marriage grew in is still there, still full of life and possibility, and our roots were protected in the darkness. The nurture I soaked up as a young person in North Carolina is still real, and can be part of my life moving forward. What a relief, what a blessing, to be reminded that I don't have to make all this shit up. That moving forward without Mike does not mean leaving the place where our tree flourished; that the same place can surprise me, nurture me, and thus my children, still.

What I - and we - have now is definitely not a tree. It is not even a sapling. But it isn't dead either; there are weird mushrooms clinging to the burnt bark, vibrant wildflowers growing in the ash-enriched soil, and tiny tree shoots here and there. There is a whole world pulsating beneath the surface -  bacteria multiplying, worms tunneling - unseen and mostly unknown even to me. I have no idea what kind of organizing vision is at work here. Who and what and how I am without Mike remain open questions.

But through it all the strange green air of time is moving, making connections above and below, and setting this tender wreckage aglow.

diminished

Once upon a time, there was a twenty year old girl sprawled on the warped wooden floorboards of her college bedroom, curling the pale blue plastic cord of the phone which she had dragged from the hall into her room around her fingers and holding the phone so close that her ear was red and warm but that didn't matter; she would have liked to become one with the phone so that she could merge with the hushed tones of Michael Brogan's voice that magically sounded from its tiny holes. She gripped it to one ear and rolled her cheek along the floor towards the little carved feet of her dresser, saw the dusty tumbleweeds huddled beyond them, the impersonal black base of the halogen standing lamp, felt the edges of her hip digging into the floor, knew herself to be in an apartment in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania shared with roommates who likely had communication needs of their own on the other side of her bedroom wall, and all of these things seemed unreal, pale and watery, in the presence of the enormous, big, exhilarating, unbelieveable love she felt leaping in her heart.

Loving you makes me a better me. 

Maybe Mike said it first. Something to that effect. He and I confessed to each other that night that something about our love seemed to bring forth the best in ourselves. Something we might not even have known was there before we met each other. We were so earnest, struggling to tell the truth, which in turn made us so vulnerable, which in turn made me at least feel as if I was participating in the kind of extreme sport that I would never in fact actually consider (base jumping? hangliding?) in which one is falling through the sky with no net on purpose. 

Yesterday was Father's Day, which I tried to ignore because being a fatherless widow solo parenting her three bereaved fatherless children on Father's Day sucks. I was doing okay with it, I thought, but as the day wore on I felt more brittle, less capable of being the kind of mother I would like to be, and when we stumbled over to our dear friends' house after dinner to play a new game I collapsed, belly-up, onto their couch and tried to act totally fine (just tired, that's all!) which lasted for about ten seconds. As soon as my friend looked at me with concern I burst into tears.

Why? Because I can't be me and Mike for the kids. I know, it just is what it is. Accept it, right? But I am so sad for my children. They are missing out on so much. They are missing out on something I can't give them, and what I can give them seems so paltry sometimes.

I sobbed incoherently about my fears of not being good enough. Not good enough to keep up what Mike and I had started together with our children. It hurts to say it out loud.

I am, incidentally, blessed with very wonderful friends.

Today I think I understand better why I can feel so ill-equipped to give them what they need. We were onto something in that rushing-recklessly-through-the-air conversation twenty-one years ago. Mike brought forth something in me, something better. What was it exactly? Intellectual rigor, moral seriousness, laughter, curiosity, ambition, boldness. Stuff like that. Stuff that sounds so luxurious now. A newfound ability to name the truth, to put aside irony and politeness and falseness and just say what I really meant about the most important things: life, death, God, art, love. Not that it wasn't complicated between us; not that we always provided a clear pathway to facilitate each other's becoming with grace. Uh, no. I mean, sometimes, but that's really hard to do. He did call to certain parts of me though, parts I might have been uncertain about sharing before Mike, and let me know they were good.

So it's not just that my kids lost their papa. They lost the mama that their papa inspired and supported too. They lost the better me.

That sounds bad, I know. Worry not. I do value myself. I know I've gotten us through a lot of super hard stuff. (Whoop de damn doo, as Mike and I would say). But I can never be the person I was, the person Mike loved - imperfectly, humanly, completely.

I fear certain windows that he propped open in me are closing. That I will harden into something small, something less without Mike to challenge me, infuritate me, to never let me off the hook. That I will take the path of least resistance, conceding to late bedtimes and snack food encased in too much plastic and even worse chore-enforcement than ever before. Also swearing. So much swearing. Okay, actually, that stuff is already happening. What I really fear is that the passion and commitment with which Mike lived his life and parented his children will be diminished - and by me of all people! I don't know how to truly honor him without him here to invite forth the me that I need in order to do the day-to-day honoring.

That was what the tears were about at the end of the day yesterday. I am afraid the me I can give to my children is so much worse than me I could give them when Mike was alive. And that seems awful. It's bad enough to lose one parent. But when one dies, you necessarily lose a part - a way - of the other as well.

That said, I had a moment in ballet class today that I want to tell you about. I can only manage to make it to this class occasionally. It is wonderful, and it is humbling. I mean, wow. Really very extremely humbling. Wow.  Bending my knees and pointing my toes turn out to be near-impossible feats. But I am finally following the teacher's sequences a bit better, and feeling a little more comfortable taking up space at the barre. Normally I stand along one side of the wall, a spot from which I can't see the mirror, which I am grateful for because the way doing barre work feels internally would suggest an external result that it would be best not to dwell upon. But anyway. Today I arrived a little late and grabbed the only spot left, in a different part of the room with excellent mirror access. I also stood at the end of a line of dancers, meaning there would be no one to watch in front of me when we turned to do the other side. Oh boy.

Here is the interesting part: it was okay. There was confusion, but not too much. And when we turned to face the barre I could not avoid seeing myself in the mirror. There I was, and I was dancing. Me! I can't explain the surprise I felt. All this time I thought I had been clumping around with my long flat feet and bowed legs, which is still true, but there was another part of the story I hadn't been able to see before today. I'm awkward and graceful. I'm soft and hard. I lose heart; I keep going. I grip the barre; I find my core. I begin again. All of it counts. I can dance.

gratitude

Everything is exactly the way it should be, he said.

It really is, this particular friend continued, smiling earnestly, looking for eyes to meet and drill home his point. This day is so beautiful. No one is sick. We're all here together. We should appreciate perfect times like this.

I looked down. I felt my throat close up. Everything is not exactly the way it should be, though who could reasonably object to his gratitude? It was Sunday and I was about to practice yoga beneath a stand of river birches on a golden May morning, gathered with a group who are warm and welcoming and well-established in their friendships and with whom I sometimes, depending on my mood, understand myself to be a charity case, a strange interloper with bad skin and ready tears in their healthy-happy-beautiful midst. 

We were in a shady corner of a tree nursery that belongs to one of the families in this group. Children of varied ages were milling around, putting together plates of bagels and lox at a table set up nearby. I prayed Beatrice would find a way in socially with the other kids and allow me this interlude, and she did. We unrolled our mats in the grass. A tiny speaker filled the air with languid reggae. The sunlight moved back and forth across my face, quiet in warrior 2, as the breeze gently ruffled the leaves of the birches. The roots beneath my mat pushed against my forehead as I rolled it back and forth in child's pose. Flies buzzed contentedly and settled on my ankles in downward dog; I blew them away and saw the blue sky overhead. We rested in savasana in the warm prickly grass. Yoga is a safe place for me; wherever I am, whomever I'm with, those movements bring the comfort of home.

But there's that time before and after the practice. Through it all those tears sat in my throat. Everything isn't the way it should be. Not for me. It truly was a glorious morning, but the greener the season, the deeper the gray.

Beatrice ran over during yoga, carrying her flip flops which were splattered in salsa because her brother is sloppy with tortilla chips. What to do? I directed her and returned to a twist. In lizard pose I looked up to see Gabriel running past, absorbed in a game, looking impossibly tall and old, his long hair flopping rhythmically with his footsteps. Like a teenager. How Mike would love to see them in their long summer bodies. They were doing just fine, despite my worries that they'd feel uncomfortable in a new place. Until of course Gabriel started feeling awfully itchy (walking through poison ivy will do that) and desperate to go home and Beatrice was starving because she refused to eat anything and they both reminded me that they always hate farms. Oh. Right. Later that afternoon we visited with a dear friend on his way to New York, and that evening had dinner with my mom in her garden. It was good. But the tears were stuck.

On Monday it was Memorial Day. After breakfast, on a whim, while Gabriel and Frances slept, Beatrice and I made a terrarium using the glass bottle I found to house a birthday terrarium for Mike years ago; in this one she selected a tiny fawn to nestle in the moss. Later I walked Beatrice to her piano lesson. Her kind teacher asked me if this was a hard day, full of memories of fun family traditions with Mike. Maybe she picked up on my heaviness. No, I said, no. No fun memories of pools and barbeques. It's fine.

But those tears eagerly crept upwards as I said it's fine. I had to wait for them to slide back down to their crying waiting room just behind my clavicle and pick their knitting back up before I could safely speak again.  

We walked to the market. Beatrice took her scooter and Frances met us for chocolate chip cookies outside. I lugged milk and yogurt and eggs home. I mowed the lawn. I pulled the heavy plastic drape off the grill that came with our house and that I have never once used and tried to turn it on while Beatrice and Gabriel watched, bemused. No go. So much for my hazy plan to make pizzas outside. Our neighbor, a rather fit lawyer, came outside and began energetically scraping and cleaning off his grill eight feet to my right. I tried a few different things while attempting to exude dignified capable parenting (rather than pathetic-weepy-widow-who-cannot-handle-a-manly-gas-grill vibes) but alas, I couldn't get our grill to wake up after its long sleep. 

My mood was plummeting. There is nothing comparable to the pure bereavement I feel when trying and failing to tackle typical dad chores in public. Mowing the lawn, dragging out the trash, using (or failing to use) a fucking grill. 

Then, just to rub it all in, Beatrice leaned over and brightly asked if we could take out her new hand-me-down bike and have our first bike-riding lesson at the park. I sat back on my heels in the bright sun and squinted at the grill instructions printed on the inside of the base and felt the sweat adhering the backs of my legs together. Um...Beatrice...did you happen to notice I'm not your papa? And did you forget that he's the one who does that kind of thing? And that I will just get testy and irritable and you'll lose your patience and probably start crying and the bike will topple over and you'll scrape your ankle and there will be no band aids and strangers will watch us and judge and the whole thing will suck so bad? 

But I didn't say that. Instead I said: great idea!

We abandoned the grill and pulled out the bike. I couldn't make the front tire move. I mustered my most superhero-like reserves of strength and fussed with the problem until I fixed it. But that didn't really help my mood. I didn't care that counter to all reasonable expectations I had single-handedly fixed a Mike problem because I don't want to fix Mike problems. I want him to fix them. I don't want to be a brittle single mother limping along through fun Memorial Day weekend activties.  

(Mike always said he hated fun. And he did! But he was a good teacher and patiently guided the kids through many firsts; he would have enjoyed teaching Beatrice to ride a bike.)

We went to the park. It wasn't as disastrous as I feared, and when she'd had enough I coasted down the grassy hill on her tiny bike to the playground where Beatrice proudly showed me how well she can do the monkey bars (a new skill) and we spent some time swinging and I couldn't get over how damn resilient she is. And cute. Frances had put make up on her earlier and she was so tickled that she had on eye shadow at the park. Scandalous! Like, anyone might see! And they'll think, oh my goodness, does her mother let her wear make up and she's only six? (Trying to capture her musical kindergarten cadence here).

We came home. Everyone was a bit limp with the humidity and draggy feeling of the late afternoon. I vacuumed. I put in a load of laundry. I began making dinner and everyone started asking me for things at once: could I open this water bottle, did I see the journal brought home from school yet, could I make a snack before dinner, could I watch this trick. Suddenly, the terribleness of it all hit me then with such force - as grief does, it will knock the wind out of you - that I couldn't beat it back a moment longer. I bent over the cutting board and cried. 

Why are you crying Mama? said Bea. Because Papa died?

Yes. It's okay. But I need five minutes.

The girls were in the kitchen. Gabriel and a friend were playing upstairs. I didn't know where to be alone so I went where all mothers who can't hold it together for another single minute go: the bathroom. I slid the door shut and sat on the cold tiled floor and leaned against it and sobbed. Moments like these illustrate the aptness of the expression wracked by grief. It hurts. When I get that overwhelmed I talk to my husband. 

I can't do it, Mike. I can't. I can't do this anymore. I know I'm really strong and blah blah blah but actually it turns out I'm not and I can't and please come back. 

It's so lonely, being a widowed parent. It's damn lonely, and wrapped in the black paper of that particular day's nadir I felt incapable. Terrible at this solo mothering gig. Fucking up left and right. Mike, Mike, I can't do this. Please help. 

Beatrice kept calling for me while this was going on so I went back to the kitchen. Frances walked to me and held out her arms for a hug.  I kept on crying, hard. Who are these children of mine, who readily volunteer to help me carry the sorrow and loneliness, who can tolerate and even accept a mother who cries? 

They are Mike's children! How many times have I said that I don't know what I would do if it weren't for my kids? It never really occured to me in all the times I have asked Mike for help since he died, that alive or dead he has always been a very real and very big part of the three people closest to me. They have his emotional wisdom. They have his humor. I love them so much.

After the Big Cry with the girls the heaviness lifted. The tears had finally been dislodged. I finished making dinner. We sat down and had an absurd, hilarious conversation about all the types of men I am not allowed to date (racists, magicians, and hair gel enthusiasts give up hope now) - if I should ever feel ready to date, that is. We cleaned up. We went outside and I put the bricks some of the the kids had painted while the adults practiced yoga on Sunday into our garden path while Beatrice and Gabriel fought each other in a crazy game with pvc pipes and paint stirrers that they had fashioned into disturbingly realistic weapons resembling bayonets and a basketball. There was a lot of screaming and laughing. I deadheaded the asters and told them to stop pointing their pipes at each others' faces. The light was fading. I could hear neighborhood kids in the alley on their bikes. 

Beatrice will join them someday. When I felt so gloomy and overcome by sadness, I was trapped by a sense of my own futility, trying to operate like a normal person in the thicket of my own grief. I can't do this. And it is true that I can't do this like I once did. Yet puttering in the garden dusk I realized that in fact I had accomplished about a hundred things on Monday, some of them while crying (which need not detract from the accomplishment). They were small things, mundane things, but meaningful things; the kind that make a house a home, and a collection of people - imperfect, lovable, muddling-along people - a family. 

lost worlds

In this, the first spring in our new home, we have planted a small garden. There are peas climbing with wild determination up purple yarn that I slid through the metal loops anchored to the wall of the garage and staked to the ground with takeout chopsticks. There are lettuces that we have harvested for two whole salads thus far. There is a tidy strawberry patch featuring six demure white flowers waiting to magically transform into six tiny strawberries that a squirrel will eat before we find them.

And all around our little rectangle of baby foods at the back of the yard is a beauty that shifts every day, an established flower garden that the previous owners tended for years before we arrived. Before Mike got sick exactly four years ago, before Beatrice was born two years before that, they were planting iris bulbs and allium and tulips and clematis. They were babying the lilac tree and building a fish pond. They didn't know that we were coming - they didn't know that our path of illness, uncertainty, and loss would one day lead us to their idyllic backyard. And yet, even so, their work is a gift to me every morning when I wake up and check to see what is blooming today.

Who would love this? Mike would love this. He was a passionate gardener. The two homes we owned together had very little going on in the way of landscaping when we arrived and he created beautiful spaces from scratch.  He loved the idea of being a steward of the land - whether it be a postage stamp front yard in the city or a sprawling yard in the suburbs - he wanted to nurture native plants, foods, flowers, and tender trees that would live on and beautify our neighborhoods long after we had left them.

So I am happy for the established flower garden, and happy for the chance to plant something new, because it is a tether to Mike and our old life. He was the real gardener - the soul gardener. We just do our best.

Last weekend we went to Annapolis. Our dear friend was delivering the commencement address at St. John's graduation and I wanted to see it. I realized enough time had passed that I wouldn't know any of the graduating seniors - nor would Mike - and this was both relieving and devastating. None of them would run up to me with concern and sadness in their eyes. I could be anonymous. But then again, how could I possibly be anonymous? How could life in this community go on so seemlessly without Mr. Brogan?

It was the first visit that was not occasioned by a traumatic purpose: no moving out of the old house, no post-death business to attend. We stayed with Katie and Chester and had Taco Saturday the night we arrived, as we had together at least two hundred times before Mike got sick. I drove past Frances's old school, visited old friends, parked behind Danielle's minivan in her driveway and walked right into the kitchen as I once did every day to pick up baby Beatrice after work. My minivan sensed that I was a bit wrecked by all this and nosed itself in all the right directions without my having to remember where to go. All I had to do was sit in the driver's seat and rest my hands on the steering wheel; it took care of the rest.

It poured all weekend. Graduation was thus held indoors and I sat up front and watched all the faculty process in, many of whom I had not seen since Mike's diagnosis. I'm not sure they all recognized me with my now-big kids and without my husband at my side. The past president walked up to me afterwards to congratulate me on my performance, thinking I was an actress he had seen in a play recently.

But Robert's speech was perfect. I don't think I'm exagerrating. It was perfect. It captured what is so special - so idealistic and beautiful and never-cynical - about the experience of learning and growing at St. John's, and reminded me of why we had to move to Annapolis so Mike could be a part of that. It was worth the sacrifices we made. Mike was a really good tutor. I cried on and off throughout Robert's speech in recognition of that: this is what he had, this is what he lost when his illness took him away from work, this is the place that - whether or not everyone there knows it - is dimmer, less complete, without him.

Yesterday I read some of the Homemade Time posts from 2011. Just ended up there, moving through that year in our lives story by story, feeling sadder and sadder. Who was that woman? I can barely remember what it felt like to be her. I was yearning for more all the time then: more beauty, more truth, more community, more connection, more love. I had enough energy to take care of two little ones all day and then have plenty left over to imagine everything I would like to give them, to debate things like school and church with Mike, to think about craft projects and cooking challenges for the next day, to wonder about my place in the world. I spent so much time with Frances and Gabriel. We made so many things. We read so many books! Candy was for special occasions; videos were rarely and judiciously permitted; everyone was in bed by 7:30.

I know it wasn't perfect. But it was an ambitiously quiet, creative, bookish life.

Can you blame me for comparing their experience to Beatrice's? If you asked her, she'd probably tell you her favorite tv show was The Office. She begs for ice cream nightly. She mimics the adolescents around her with impressive accuracy. We read before bed, but that's about it, and she was up until ten last night, hollering every few minutes at me that she was scared and absolutely could not fall asleep. I just hollered back, because I was feeling sick and too exhausted to employ the every-five-minute bravery marble behavioral technique I've been using for the past two nights: I know you are, and I know you can do it!

Where are her tender, quiet hours spent arranging bits of yarn and cardboard? Who will she be, with no Papa stretched out on the couch reading King Lear and Aristotle and The Brothers Karamazov, modeling the joys of a contemplative life as he did for her brother and sister? I would get so annoyed at him, oblivious to the encircling chaos while I tried to make dinner. The only sound that got his attention was a grammatical error: he'd abruptly lift his head, look towards its source, and with his characteristic, infuriating authority say, "fewer, not less" before returning to his book.

What I now realize is that I cannot make dinner - and mow the lawn and pay the bills and bring them to the dentist and help them with their homework - and model the joys of silent, focused reading. I can't do it all. I have no one to show them the treasures of quiet, focus, contemplation, comfort and stillness in being at home. I have no one with whom to show them the challenges and joys of marriage, of partnership, of balance. It's just me, and I am one-half of what they used to have. The loss to who they were, are, and will be is staggering.

I worry they have been stiffed in a way that I cannot possibly make up for. I have none of that excess of energy and ambition that I once gave them, and Mike, and our little community. Nowadays it seems I use everything I've got getting us through the day as best I can.

I know our family is in a different developmental moment than we once were. A lot happened during the crisis-laden cancer years. My big kids are now independent, identified with friends and interests, heading off to an activity most nights of the week. Our dinners are quick and simple so they won't be late to soccer. And Beatrice, as the youngest, would be getting dragged around with them whether or not Mike was alive.

But. But Mike isn't reading on the couch. Or tending the garden. Or taking them to the lab or a concert at St. John's on the weekend. If he hadn't been taken from us, I might not be as thoughtful about creating a home and supporting our kids as I once was, but I think the person I am now would be more continuous with the person I was then. My body and heart and soul would be more spacious. The relentlessness of grief, the responsibility of being the lone parent, and the task of making us into a new kind of family shrinks that space. There's less room for yearning. There's less for setting boundaries in order to make a nurturing space apart from the noise and violence of consumer culture for my children to find peace within. I simpy don't have it in me to create the family space I once held with Mike.

I can't be a father and a mother. I can't be Mike and me. Hell, these days I can barely be me. Without him, I have to do so much more, and I fear, as a result, be so much less.

While there are plenty of things I wish Mike were here now to do for this family, more than any of it, I wish he were here to be. I wish my kids could have the gift of growing up in the presence of his unique and precious being.  Can you blame me for worrying I will fail them?