fan letter

Dear Kevin Wilson,

I don't know anything about you, and I don't want to. I don't want to put your other books on hold at the library, or follow you on social media, or see your name pop up in the table of contents in the next New Yorker I miraculously manage to crack open because more details would make you into a more real person, which would dim the magic of the world you made in Nothing to See Here. I want the inner fabric of the story to stay real, so I think it's best if you remain in its shadowy periphery. But I also want to say thank you to someone because it was so good - so very good - and I feel a lot of hope for myself and for my kids in the wake of finishing it under a little spotlight on this airplane gliding through the dark night sky somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, or maybe Florida. I can't see a thing down there so it's hard to say. But it feels good to point one's gratitude in a particular direction. (Which is, incidentally, a big part of why I believe in God.)

I started your book a couple of days into a trip to Jamaica with my three children, after I had finished Nora McInerny's second memoir, No Happy Endings. Somehow that seems pertinent because the two stories have been talking to each other in my mind. My husband died twenty-one months ago after nearly three years of experimental treatments for his rare lymphoma. Five days before we departed for Jamaica, the first man I've dated since Mike died broke up with me after three very disorienting and exciting weeks. My children were not at all pleased with this brief romance; not that I wanted them to know about it, but predictably the cat yowled and scratched its way out of that bag almost immediately. So it was a thing. And its ending was strange and sad for me but eventually - like two days later - I came to see that it was right and felt peaceful about it. He wasn't well enough, and I've done enough caregiving for the time being. But now I know that kind of thing can happen.

Needless to say, there were many moments while swimming and sunning and ordering three Shirley Temples and one mojito at the swim up bar at the Beaches resort in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, surrounded by healthy happy not even sunburned mom-dad-and-two kids families when I felt like a total weirdo. I felt marked by all we have been through, like there must be a big flashing sign over my head blinking the word GRIEVING or LONELY or BUSTED or maybe just NOT NORMAL* with a big arrow pointing at my heart. I couldn't help but notice that I seemed to be the only single parent in the whole strange alternate world of the resort. I was definitely the only person who cried the whole boat trip back from snorkeling, thinking of the calm Papa presence my terrified Beatrice didn't have with her in the water, and the wonderful guide who offered her his own impersonal version of that, which totally worked.

But I also had so many moments of gratitude, and awareness of the closeness and understanding I have with my kids. They are weirdos with me. They know. They didn't glom onto the packs of privileged children that roamed the resort, ice cream cones in hand, dripping chlorine in line at the water slide, yelling to one another. That would have been fine, and they could have done that, because they have decent social skills, plus they're pretty privileged too and took to the endless supplies of sweets and thrills just as effortlessly as any well-tended American child would. But I think we preferred each others' company. Only we knew what their Papa would say about the late night karaoke that kept us awake at night, or the curly fries we ate every day, or the way Beatrice, eyes shining, loved snorkeling in the end. Only we knew that we were there because he died - no way would Mike have set foot in that place. Also we're smart and funny and good company. And excellent huggers. And we are, actually, ready to embrace everything, to eat it all, drink it in, tolerate fear and cheesiness in equal measure despite our (to varying degrees) cautious temperaments, because of all we have lost.

So anyway. Your quiet/not quiet excellent book gave me hope for weirdo children, and weirdo adults too. For the possibility that lonely weirdo adults can take good care of lonely weirdo children, and not let them down ever - at least not in any big terrible ways. Right now my heart is so broken and so big, so vast, in this strange and unplanned and porous moment in my life. Your novel offered an unexpected version of that state of being. I recognized myself in it. Who wouldn't, really? I love that.

Thank you.

yours truly,
Meagan



*I do realize that these are feelings most all humans experience, even gorgeous moms with living husbands sipping frozen drinks on the beach in Jamaica. Nothing to see here, I know. It was just hard to remember that sometimes during our trip.

growing

A few months after Mike died I stumbled upon a community of fellow widows in the most unlikely of places. Social media! At the time the Hot Young Widows Club was a private Facebook group (they've since changed platforms) with an Instagram presence (still going strong); my wading into that particular online support community seemed to open up into deeper waters, all varieties of people and groups having to do with grief, trauma, recovery, healing. Being a hot young widow is damn isolating, and here were countless people who knew all about it.

In the beginning I couldn't stop reading their stories. I could've spent a week in bed, curled up with my phone, content to slide into so much sadness with nothing to slow my descent. But of course my life doesn't facilitate that kind of thing, and over time I've become more moderate with my online widow world consumption. I even share occasionally, and man am I grateful, because when I do my fellow wids share their hard-won wisdom and dark humor generously and it is always helpful.

The solidarity and sadness and inspiration and wisdom is a big part of why Facebook and Instagram have me hooked. That, and the weird scab-picking thing I do while scrolling through other peoples' intact happy families and active social lives. It's kind of weird, really. Wids affirming this life is fucking hard alongside non-wids sharing photos of their fucking joyful anniversary dates which makes a part of me shrivel and spit and curl up in a ball inside. A part that apparently likes to do that, because I haven't stopped scrolling.

And sometimes, sometimes, a meme wanders onto my Instagram of a gorgeous, thin-in-a-tasteful-way twenty-something woman staring meaningfully off into a sunset that features inspiring words about how grief teaches us to truly love ourselves - or something like that - and touches both ends of the social media universe for me: something that is intended to offer validation to the griever (c'est moi) but also makes the griever feel like a total freak. I am so not staring at the sunset. I am crying in the minivan.

Recently I read the story of a young woman who lost her husband and the more I read, the more irritated I felt. She exuded self-assurance. Her feelings about her partner and their relationship seemed uncomplicated. She took a very long time off work after he died, traveling and exploring herself through creative expression of various sorts. She advocated taking as much time as one needs to heal following a loss and she had a beautiful narrative to share about what had happened to both of them. It all seemed so ... tidy.

And irritating. Very. The shriveled smallness within me reads that version of loss and says: oh, how nice for you. Retreats, faraway beaches, endless travel, the occasional profound encounter with a medium on another continent. Those are great ideas, sure. I would love to "heal" too but what about my children, house, job, cats, HVAC filters, dying houseplants, weird middle-aged health issues? There are so many obligations, so many anchors fixing me to this spot. How do I invite grief to move through me when my own movement can feel so very confined?

But then I had this uncomfortable, familiar suspicion: I maybe hide behind my responsibilities. Not that I don't have a legit bunch of them...but I maybe kinda sorta have always done that. This enneagram type 2 is afraid of even articulating a desire to heal, even as I look around and see the signs of healing in my life miraculously happening despite my ambivalence and without my explicit consent: I can sleep at night, I feel less vigilance and worry, I fixate less on the traumas we shared, I have space and energy to think about what I want in my life now without feeling guilt or anxiety about leaving Mike behind. At least not as much.

Making grief about me and my needs - as many have modeled for me online - feels dangerously close to betraying those I love most. Isn't this about them? When Mike was sick I helped him and the children carry their feelings. They were so big, and so hard. I tried to clear a space in myself to be what they needed then. I was all responsiveness, reassurance. Also exhaustion. Now I spend my days at work helping my clients hold their feelings, then come home and do my best (which is not always pretty, but I'm trying) to be present to my kids in the whirlwind of their activities and ever-changing emotional needs and the race to get homework and dishes and showers in before it gets so late that I feel like a bad mom.

Letting Mike and the kids be at the center of things is a way to let myself off the hook. Avoidance. It's a temptation I think many of us understand. I have always struggled to articulate and take responsibility for my own needs. Going through such terrors with Mike gave me insight and courage I didn't know I had in that department, but it's still super scary. If I say what I want, will I still be a good mom? A good widow? Will I still be worthy of love if I give to myself sometimes rather than slip into the more comfortable and long-established habit of giving to them?

I often instinctively feel my grief should be about Mike. He's the one that suffered, he's the one who is missing every amazing thing that happens on a regular old Monday night around here. But it is also true that he and I traveled that fiery, solitary path together. And yet I am still here, holding these ashes that smudge and darken my hands and eyes. It seems a waste to watch them slowly flutter away on stray gusts of wind; in braver days, I would rather bury them, nourishing my own soil, and wait for something new and surprising to shoulder its green way up out of the ground.

Maybe growing is a better light to move towards than healing, with its whiff of resolution and meme-ready tidiness. This hurts forever. I wouldn't have it any other way. But a girl can do a hell of a lot with open wounds; maybe more than she could before she sustained them. She can risk telling you about her longing to find spaces to exist apart from her identities of mother, therapist, widow, daughter, sister, friend. Her yearning to stretch and move everything: body and soul, spirituality, creativity, sexuality, language, intellect. Her desire to feel her own power, to go somewhere new. To be quiet, to be loud. To be a stranger. To be strange.

Thank you, irritating social media widow. I feel brave today because of you.

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.