the season of loose ends

I know the season is changing because my feet are freezing. It's fall now, yes, but for me it's also wool sock season - an extended state that usually starts in October and ends in early May. It was perfect this afternoon. I forgot my jacket in my office because I didn't need it walking out into the golden sunshine after work, and I changed directly into sandals when I got home. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I'd forgotten that as the sky darkens, my toes start to turn to icy appendages prone to going numb with the chill, even if the chill in question is a balmy sixty four degrees.

Getting into cold sheets with cold feet at night is the worst. (Sleeping in this weather is, incidentally, the best). For twenty years I coped by stealthily sliding my flipper-like feet in between Mike's legs. Sometimes he would scream. Or more often, after a gasp: your feet are made of ice, Meagan. There were jokes about the blood not being able to make it down the interminable length of my feet. Who knows the reason they are so freakishly cold, but luckily Mike was always warm and didn't really mind (he sometimes grabbed an icy appendage on purpose, to cool down). It was a little ritual we played out every night. Occasionally I'd wear my wool socks to bed and he'd protest. What! That's crazy, he'd say. Take those awful things off. C'mon, just go ahead and put your feet right here...Honestly, his hot skinny calves provided rather skimpy skin contact, but it was enough to take the edge off and I'd fall right asleep.

Last night, after eating my way through a couple of stressful parenting situations and finally getting everyone into bed, I read the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday paper (yes, you're right, last night was Wednesday) which was a fine thing to do to feel like a normal person again (highly recommend reading about Pedro Almodovar and Antonio Banderas while remembering scenes from Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown if you need to recover your emotional equilibrium) but I did it sans slippers and by the time I came upstairs and brushed my teeth and slid my bare legs and feet into the marvelous clean cool sheets the freezing feet situation was irreversible.

Mike and I bought this enormous mattress just before Christmas in 2005. Frances was sixth months old. It might have been our first real date after she was born; my mother had come over so that we could go to the holiday party for the clinic where I was working. We were dressed up. Frances had just fallen asleep. I felt ambivalent about leaving her, not to mention nervous about socializing with a bunch of big personalities I had only recently started working alongside. As we tiptoed away from our sleeping baby's room, Mike hesitated in the darkened hallway, looked at me and said: should we go to the mall and buy a new mattress instead?

We'd been sleeping on one I bought from the friend of a friend in Brooklyn for twenty-five dollars. It had traveled with us to four different apartments and now at least one of us wasn't a grad student anymore. We had often talked about how nice it would be to have a real bed. A new bed. So that's how we spent that night, all dolled up, lying down on every mattress in the department store at the mall together, our nice shoes hanging off the ends, debating their firmness and comfort.

The bed we chose is the same bed I got into last night. My feet no longer hunt for Mike's slender legs, nosing towards his side of the bed on chilly nights. I got into bed last night and I thought damn. Summer's over; here we go. How do I cope with my icy feet in this new house, this new life? I don't know how I deal with this. What are my techniques going to be?

Then I stopped, surprised. Wait. Just a few days ago I had realized we have lived in this house for an entire year. We closed at the end of September in 2018. That I meant I already had slept in this bed, in this room, on many chilly nights. But in that moment I honestly couldn't remember any of them. Had I really gotten into this empty bed, in a room Mike had never shared with me, in just this way, alone, hundreds of times? It didn't seem possible.

Time is so weird. Have I said that before? Time is so weird.

This morning over oatmeal I asked Bea if she could remember what last fall was like in this house. She immediately began describing snacks and games and face paint and I quickly realized she thought I had asked her if she remembered the last fall fest - at her school - (she does) - so I waited until she was done and then asked her about the fall season. Like, what did we do?

Regular stuff. I was in the primary class then. 

Halloween? Did we do Halloween?

Yeah, Mama. 

And Christmas? Where did we put the tree? 

In the corner, in the living room. 

And did we buy it with anyone?

Robert.

No, no, I actually do remember that Beatrice - that was when Papa was sick having his transplant in the hospital in Philadelphia. Robert helped us get the tree. But what about last year?

Oh, yeah. That was just you and me and Didi and Gabriel.

I felt really, really weird. I couldn't remember getting the tree at all. I sat there silently looking at the floorboards in the hall, newly exposed since we ripped up the carpeting, then watching a cat try to trap a fly on the windowsill in vain, then looking at nothing at all, until Beatrice teased me for staring into space and acting weird. 

I sure as heck felt weird. I still do. It's as if I've lost an entire year. I can honestly barely remember what it felt like to be in my bedroom at this time last year. All the important holidays are remote in my mind. I think back to clients I worked with and I'm not sure what we did together.

Once, shortly after Mike died, someone who had gone through a similar loss told me that sure, the first year is really hard, but the second year is so much worse. You think you've finally made it through all those milestones, and that things should get better from here on out...but then they don't. It just feels more real.

Did I need to hear that five weeks into widowhood? Not so much.

It was crushing because I couldn't imagine an anvil in all the world heavy enough to be heavier than the one already sitting on my chest. I could barely breathe as it was. So I brushed that comment aside. Except I didn't, because I think of it often now, one year and seven months into this strange season of grief that goes on and on and never stops. Freezing toes forever. I can breathe easier now, it's true. I can enjoy things more, I'm more functional, more settled into solo parenthood. But the pain of life without my partner is relentless, and the wrongness of each and every first without him (like Frances going to her high school's homecoming dance last weekend) only becomes more irrefutable. It grows in magnitude, weight, darkness. The wrongness is like a force that pushes against me, reminding me of how we are marked for always, of what we have lost and keep on losing with each new glorious step the children take. 

With my clients I sometimes talk about uncovering and wondering about core beliefs. What are the deep beliefs they hold about who they are, how the world works, and what things are supposed to be like that inform their thoughts and feelings, that can run up against their present realities and create conflict and tensions inside? Core beliefs can be messages from childhood, from culture, from family; assumptions that lodge beneath rational, explicit thought and filter our experiences. 

Losing a life partner necessarily puts one's core beliefs into question. The ground on which my judgments and decisions and ideas stood has shifted and crumbled. A widow is untethered from the steady posts of her married identity. She is at loose ends. And she has to be. The only way to avoid the crisis is to refuse the present, and the future, which is pretty hard to do. 

I don't think you can overstate the profundity of the inner change, the inner loosening, that loss sets in motion.

So this strange season in our house that we are eleven days into our second year of living in has been one of shifting beliefs. I've reached back to childhood to test out my old core beliefs, like the things I re-embraced in North Carolina over the summer: history is important, place matters deeply, a tree can tell a sacred story. I am at home in a rhododendron forest near a cold, cold waterfall. (More simply: nature can provide a home for me.) Or the things I have learned through the harrowing experience of loss: I can say no, I can ask for help, I can be loved even if I say no and even if I need help. I can tell the truth. I can pierce my nose if I want to; I can take out a piercing if I want to. Or the old beliefs I have had to question with clearer eyes since I lost Mike: that I have always felt different, and that that has always been a source of pride and a source of shame. I have always been afraid to ask for everything I need. I have always been afraid to need, to falter, to make mistakes. And then there are the beliefs that belonged to Mike, but became part of my internal landscape, part of my inner calculations around decisions and priorities, that I have had to reluctantly give back to him, recognizing that they aren't mine to hold onto. 

What remains, besides these consistently cold feet and my discomfort with their surprising size? Is there anything about me that remains securely tethered? 

I think this unavoidable quality of being at loose ends is related to my faltering memory. This shifting about, as if my soul was a collection of marbles being carried in a box and rolling every which way with each slight turn and tip, it makes for a certain haziness.

Year One: We survived.

Year Two: What the fuck happened?

I won't even venture to speculate about Year Three, but with all that rolling around in there, I do believe anything could happen. Anything at all. 

mundane glories

Yesterday I got in the car just in time to hear Nina Totenberg's remembrance of Cokie Roberts, one she delivered with a grace and realness that made me marvel. Her friend had just died, hours ago. She had said goodbye in the hospital the night before. She had told Cokie that she would see her on the other side, where she knew that she would still be a star.

She said it like she meant it. Like she expected to be reunited with her friend. I cried. I want to go to the big broadcasting studio in the sky with them, and with everyone I love.

These early fall days have been hard for me. Hard in regular ways, "normal people" ways, or at least semi-normal people ways. I get home from work, there is usually about half an hour at home to check in with our new lovely sitter, listen to all the kids at once, greet the neighbor friends who are with them, jumping on the trampoline or playing Magic upstairs, and realize I don't know what to do about dinner. Then it's shuttling Gabriel to soccer or martial arts, Beatrice to swimming, Frances to play rehearsals. Reminders to practice guitar and scoop the kitty litter and sitting with Beatrice while she does her first grade homework. Feeding everyone somehow in the in between times (last night as I was saying goodnight to Gabriel he mentioned that he was starving. Wait - did you eat dinner tonight? Uh...no. Oh, well, I said. Too late now.) Braiding hair, hunting for clean laundry, loading the dishwasher, feeding the cats.

Remembering to breathe, forgetting to breathe, missing Mike. Missing my partner to share it with, to help me with decisions, to get mad at for not thinking to wipe down the kitchen counters after dinner or to thank for taking on a bedtime routine so I could stretch out on the couch with the New Yorker for a few minutes.

Despite the breakneck pace, each day this week I've mentioned to someone that today is the Most Perfect Day of the Entire Year. It's been gorgeous. Then the next day I wake up and it's the Most Perfect Day again. That's just mid September, when even a humble Pennsylvania town glows like a jewel around 6:30 in the evening. I was seeing everything lit by the golden setting sun tonight, noticing the brilliant edges around every leaf and brick and stop sign. I felt sad.

It was nice. Don't get me wrong, it was nice. But it wasn't striking me in the way it did when Mike was sick. I missed the heartwrenching beauty of those cancer falls we had together. Four years ago I walked these same streets; we had just arrived from our old heathy oblivious life in a state of fear and confusion. We were only three or four weeks into the first round of chemo and I remember how yellow the light looked, how unbelievably cute and clever the squirrels seemed, the way the electrical wires slashed through the bright blue sky overhead. Everything was beautiful, so beautiful it hurt.

We had two more falls together like that. We lived with so much uncertainty and pain then, and the ensuing rawness I felt often left me aching before the mundane glories of the small town we live in: its flowers, signs, hawks, children, rowhomes, dogs. The scudding clouds overhead. The red maples and yellow gingkos autumn reliably, miraculously brings.

Anyway. I don't feel the ache this year. I think it's pretty, sure. Nice. Nice day, today. Most Perfect Day of the Year! But heartbreakingly, bonecrushingly, unbearably beautiful? Not so much. Also we're late for swimming, can you guys please get in the car already.

And that makes me sad. I miss the world as I saw it when Mike was alive. I miss the quiet awareness of his grief before so much goodness, his grappling with the reality that he might have to say goodbye to the mundane glories of the world too soon. I miss the subterranean anguish I felt, beneath all my other feelings, for him and with him, a terrible underground river that I didn't always want to acknowledge. Simple pleasures brought tears to his eyes. We were cracked open, each in our own way but also in relationship, feeling our own pain and each others' pain. It could make a regular old Wednesday in September absolutely exquisite.

Add exquisite September to the pile of secondary losses. When your person dies, you lose the whole world you shared with him. It doesn't feel the same anymore because it isn't the same anymore. A September without Mike getting excited about school supply shopping has to lose some of its sparkle. It's just the way it is, which is sad. You lose the future you'd imagined, yes, but you also lose the present you'd come to depend upon and enjoy.

So many secondary losses! Also tertiary, quarternary, hundredthary, gazillionthary losses. They just keep rippling outwards, touching every new season and special day and grocery shopping trip and vacation.

I miss the world we shared together. I miss the person I was with Mike.

I still like being me, but it's a hell of a lot harder. Moving through the world while grieving your most important person is like bushwhacking a path through a new, wild landscape, even if the streets and stoplights and trees still stand. The names of the places haven't changed; no place will ever be the same again.

last bounce

Gabriel lingered in the doorway that leads to the backyard, where our two-week-old trampoline lives. It was getting dark out. The dinner dishes were nearly all put away and I was reviewing what would happen in the morning over a pile of clean laundry: wake up times for everyone, where the new school supplies were, when we needed to leave the house.

C'mon Mama, he said. Come jump on the trampoline. It's the last night of summer.

As soon as I finish putting away the laundry, I said.

Mama, just come. You're the best one. Come jump with me.

You guys go ahead, I said. I'll be there in a minute.

Beatrice joined him. I could hear them whooping and laughing. I put away a stack of dishtowels in the drawer next to the oven and then put the kids' clothes on the bottom stair and then let my forehead rest on the cool white wall in the hallway opposite framed pictures of Mike and the family we used to be and cried. For a moment.

The first day of school without you. Again. And this year Frances is going to high school.

And they are all so beautiful, and bright, and infuriating, and tall. And you are missing it.

I took an inbreath, I exhaled loud and long. I went out into the near-darkness. Gabriel and Beatrice were thrilled to see me. I crawled in through the little zippered flap in the netting and began jumping with them. With all the heightened emotions that the last day of summer had brought I recklessly decided to join them without stopping in the bathroom first, and as any of you who have borne and birthed multiple babies can predict, by the third glorious jump had peed right through my shorts. I didn't even care. I did mention it to Gabriel and Beatrice, who suggested I just keep on peeing.

Over the side, Mama. How about in the flowers? said Beatrice. Anywhere in the yard! Just don't go back inside!

Frances came out and climbed onto the trampoline with us. I decided to indeed simply ignore the peeing for a few more crazy bounces; it seemed a fair price to pay in order to delay breaking the joyful vespertine spell we all sparkled under.

Last week I met with my spiritual director and told her about my summer experiences and the moments of unexpected peace and stillness they had offered me, and in tandem with these, two recent dreams that I experienced more as visitations than as typical worry-laden loopy narratives.

Mike came to see me. That's what I thought after I woke from the first: Mike came to see me. I felt so content. It was right before I left to visit a friend at a very remote college community in California all by myself. I was so worried in those days about leaving the kids and the house and the cats and my mother and friends and the babysitters and camp directors who would care for them in my absence. In the dream Mike came and sat on the edge of my bed.

It was so simple, so peaceful. We said very little. We didn't take our eyes off each other. I told him how happy I was that he came.

Yes, he said, smiling.

After the trip I dreamed I came home to find him watering the garden. I went up behind him and hugged him. He held the hose in his left hand and smiled at me. I wasn't sure he knew he had died but I wasn't about to bring it up; it was just too nice to greet him as we might have normally in the evening after school and work. He took a moment to inspect my skin, asking if my perioral dermitis had been acting up, and was I feeling okay?

Oh yes, it's been fine.

Mike's care for me was something I hadn't thought about in a long time. The feeling of his concern, his care. And the love he had for plants. The peacefulness he brought to gardening and tending outside spaces. His quiet, tender, understated kindnesses.

I loved our trips this summer. I loved being in my old North Carolina home, and in the stark, stirring California desert. I didn't worry about betraying Mike, or leaving him behind, or doing things in a way he wouldn't like. I am growing in trust, perhaps, but more than that the dreams gave me the permission I needed to encounter those places just as I am, in this moment, in the midst of this harrowing loss that is still happening - a loss that isn't an event with a beginning middle and end but rather a part of me that never stops - a loss that has space for gasping stolen tears in the hallway and unhinged wild bouncing with my three bereaved beloved children in a pair of wet shorts on a Sunday night in August when we should be getting ready for bed.

When I finished telling my spiritual director about the summer's riches, and my newfound ability to engage in them with so much less anxiety and sorrow and guilt, she smiled a beautiful smile. She said it was a joy to see me coming out. Or rather, returning to myself. Emerging, circling back, strengthening in who I am. And how extraordinary it was, how incredible, that God loved me so very much and had offered these people and places to help me in the process of circling back - and in and out - all at the same time.

Yes, that sounded right. I felt light hearted, grateful. I left her with a tender sensitivty to the aching world around me. I got into my minivan which seemed to nose forward of its own accord and looked around at the tree-lined streets I know so well, the corner stores, the stone churches, the wires overhead, the bright blue sky. At a red light I leaned forward, resting my forearms on the wheel, and happened to look over my right shoulder and out the open window where I saw a little girl standing on her pink scooter on the cracked sidewalk a few feet away. Her sweaty bangs were sticking to her temples. Our eyes met for a moment, and then, then, then her face opened into the most exquisite grin. She was missing teeth. Her eyes shone. She waved at me. The light turned green and I smiled and waved back with a heart full to bursting as I continued my sail down E. Orange Street.

And then the fullness was too much, and I sobbed.

I love the world. It is so beautiful it hurts. I am alive, and Mike is missing it.

on the hook

In ballet class a couple of weeks ago, our teacher Nadine was giving some instruction before we began a sequence of tendus at the bar. She emphasized, per usual, that we should draw up in the front and down in the back, that we should imagine a hook right through the top of the skull pulling us upwards. All you have to do is hang on it. She paused and smiled knowingly at us.

Easy, right?

We all smiled back. Oh yeah, sure. Easy. Then she turned her elegant back on us to begin the music.

I like the hook imagery - faintly gruesome as it may be - even better than the invisible cord I was taught to imagine pulling me up nice and tall as a child. I like the heft and gleam of a hook, it's there-ness. I can almost feel it.

In everyday life I twist and contort and otherwise rebel via a thousand embodied objections to the simplicity and space my hook offers. I move as if it isn't there, gently tugging me upwards. I lean into one hip, tired of standing. I tense the muscles of my neck, my shoulders creep up into my ears, I bend my upper spine into the curl of a shepherd's crook to better see my phone. But then, if the stars align, for one hour on Monday mornings I try my best to cooperate with its gracious intentions, which is honestly nearly impossible. Nadine walks by and pushes one shoulder down, draws one hip forward, gently correcting all the crazy asymmetries and tensions my forty-two year old body has acquired. I've come by them all honestly. But still.

I've been meeting with a spiritual director occasionally over the past months and during one of our conversations, I was talking about my children's discomfort with church and God - the very idea of God - since Mike's death. Their religious education was paramount to Mike, and he worried about what would happen after he died. I took offense at this, thinking he didn't trust me to take them to Sunday School and church and continue the traditions we had developed together as a family. We had a fight about it not that long before he died; I felt so hurt that he didn't trust me to parent them in the ways we always had, not to mention that it sounded to me that he suspected I wasn't invested in my own faith. Like I was just going along with things, it didn't really matter that much, and once he was out of the picture I'd ignore the children and take my Sunday mornings back for the secular pleasures of the New York Times and yoga class and brunch.

That's what I heard and felt then, anyway. Now it occurs to me that Mike might have foreseen their hurt and anger and understood that their - and my - relationship to God and faith would necessarily change if he died. Get a lot more complicated, at the very least. I hadn't considered that. I hadn't considered anything about Mike dying while he was still alive, not even in his final hours, because I couldn't bear to.

But damn, Mike could be prescient. Not to mention annoyingly unflinching in the face of difficult realities. And getting anyone to come to church with me these days is downright painful. I don't think forcing will help the situation, so I'm sitting and waiting and feeling very uncomfortable with the unsettled, avoidant relationship my children have with church. I'm imagining Mike's disappointment, and feeling that awful weight, and waiting for the path forward to reveal itself.

I'm also reading the paper and going to yoga and taking the kids to brunch. Which I enjoy.

Anyway, I was bringing this to my spiritual director and she asked me about my own conflicted feelings about God, independent of the kids and Mike. Well, yes. I am very twisted up with this one. I would like Mike's vision and faith. I want security and comfort in my own relationship with God, but some of the time I'm not even confident She exists. Or if She does, what exactly Her relationship to creation is. Or how she might respond to the way I swear over obituaries for people - especially men - who live to be 94 years old. That fucker. Good for him. Hope he enjoyed his legions of great-goddamn-grandchildren. What does God make of that? 

I am sure that I have never stopped yearning for God - wondering and wishing and wanting - but when Gabriel asks me how I can worship a God who "just keeps on smiting you like this" I really don't have a good answer.

My spiritual director pointed out that even if I'm not sure God exists, even if I'm mad at God, even if I feel completely lost, God loves me just as much. You don't have to be or do or think or feel anything in particular, she explained. God isn't withdrawing from you because you have doubts, or because you haven't been able to persuade your kids to go to Sunday School since Mike died, or because you don't pray in a particular way. God loves you fully, completely, without condition.

Oh.

Now sometimes I say a prayer that goes something like thanks for loving me even if I'm not so sure about You.

And I really mean it. I say it with a peaceful, grateful heart. I love it when I realize that something isn't up to me. God's love isn't in my control. Whether I'm aware of it or not, whether I like it or not, God has Her divine outrageous shiny heavenly hooks in me, and they won't suddenly dislodge if I'm pissed off or avoiding church or letting Mike and the kids down on the religious front.

What does that even mean? Not sure. But I like to imagine that underlying connection as I do my ballet hook: there are gestures one can make, an awareness one can cultivate, that might enable a certain ease and strength in hanging on the hook that is always already there anyway. One can participate in hookedness, cooperate, consent, even show gratitude for the endless tugging, and thus create space and possibility and maybe even a lightening of our pain.

Maybe it's all the same hook anyway. When I feel myself tall and broad and wide, when I stand in tadasana fully, I am aware of it as a gesture that embodies receptivity and gratitude. Maybe simply standing up straight it is a way of acknowledging and making space for God's tugging, tireless love. (Funny that standing up straight is so ridiculously hard to do.)

I went to church - by myself - yesterday morning, and one of the readings was about Martha and Mary. Oh man, do I feel uncomfortable when Jesus says Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things. Your sister Mary has the right idea. I become Martha and I want to throw up my hands and say fine Jesus, fine, but who is going to make dinner if we are all sitting at your feet? You're right, I am worried and distracted, but if I'm not, who will get all this shit done? Do you have any children? Do you have any idea how hard it is to get everyone to swimming and soccer and internships and guitar and piano lessons and to pack their lunches and get them to dentist appointments and worry about their social and emotional development and schooling and help them fall asleep when they are scared and make them do a chore now and then and convince them to get over their terror in the water and just learn to swim already?

And have you ever tried doing this kind of thing when your husband is dead, and there's no one to turn to and say this is so hard, what should we do, and you're really sad and lonely, and the buck always and forevermore stops with you and only you?

The priest did a nice job of interpreting the passage in a more inclusive light, citing various writers who believe Jesus is not dismissing Martha's actions but rather showing us that her activity and Mary's receptivity are complementary aspects of a faithful life. Sounds nice, but I can't get around Jesus's words. Mary has the better part. Mary totally wins. Martha feels hurt and put upon and to make it worse she's missing out on the better part.

Oh, Martha. I see you. It's so hard.

But then I thought about the hook. I looked up at the ring of childlike angels painted on the round, high ceiling above the altar - they are rimmed in gold and all alike and appear to be looking kindly down on us humans below, their hands tented in prayer. I imagined them all holding fishing lines between their palms. Fishing lines connected to hooks.

There's that whole I-will-make-you-fishers-of-men bit, and the loaves and fishes etc, but maybe before and beneath any of that we are just a bunch of big fat fish, always already hooked ourselves. Always already loved completely, always already part of something much bigger than whether we are anxious do-ers or dreamy be-ers. Martha and Mary are equally cherished, equally connected. Maybe the most important part of the story is that Jesus is there with them both. When I had that thought, I didn't feel quite so defensive and protective of Martha/myself. I felt a glimmer of my own state of hookedness. Everyone sitting around me, too. Their always-already-no-matter-what-lovedness. And I thought of Mike, and how it didn't make much sense to think death would change a single thing about his - or anyone else's - being beautifully, unconditionally, always and forevermore on the hook.