notes on a quarantine, week seven

Every couple of days, since this all began, I’ve had the occasion to think a very strange thought: thank goodness Mike isn’t here. My heart grips and clings to itself with residual fear at the very idea. I mean sick Mike, of course, which is the Mike I usually think of first. Immunocompromised chemotherapy Mike, stem cell transplant patient Mike. We already lived through a reality in which other people with their unwashed hands and innocent coughs scared us. We didn’t let them in the house. We wore masks and gloves and stockpiled hand sanitizer. There’s still one from that era rolling around inside the minivan. It was very terrible.

So whenever I consider layering the realities of a global pandemic onto that state of baseline cancer vigilance I feel utter dread. Then relief: we don’t have to live that story. Then shock, and heartbreak: other people do. They are waiting for their counts to come back up, sequestered on stem cell transplant patient units, worried about what going home to this will be like.

But yesterday, something changed. I went on a muddy, rainy walk with Frances in our County Park (because you have to go on a walk, no matter what the weather says) and on the way home we stopped at the cemetery. I’d been wanting to visit since Easter. We walked up the grassy hill to Mike’s headstone and stood watching the rain fall around us and patter in the smooth gray bowl of its birdbath. We talked about why it was important that his body was there, and that we could visit that quiet place.

Mike, Mike. We’re here.

Lately I have been terrified afresh that I will forget him. I will forget the good things. I will lose the comforts of his smell, cadence, feel, rhythm - and when I do I will be lost, untethered to my first twenty years of adulthood, the roots of my family, the tree I am trying to nurture back into some kind of stability and bloom. This thought is much worse than the idea of caring for him in quarantine. It shakes me. I am afraid it is not a fear but an already-underway reality. I am afraid I have done a bad job of holding him here with us, and without him we will scatter to the winds.

At the cemetery I feel less afraid.

Being there was the first time I could imagine healthy Mike with us right now. I smiled, thinking of him zooming a seminar from the dining room and bitching about the impossibility of it, getting obsessive about the garden, carefully picking movies for us to watch together as a family. I thought of how he would sit with Beatrice and gently nurture her innate curiosity about numbers and words, excellent teacher that he was, or talk through Gabriel’s research project with him, or edit an essay with Frances. He would do all the things that I am not, because I’m working all day.

If you asked, these days Beatrice would tell you she hates school. I know it’s because seven year olds are not meant to learn remotely, in solitude, but it breaks my heart all the same. When I have a cancellation I run upstairs and typically find her curled up somewhere with her face four inches away from a screen. I say hooray, I have some time! Let’s look at your math. And I want her to light up with the love of learning and gratitude for her mama's unexpected special attention, to shift gears immediately in happy celebration of our stolen hour of shared home school. Instead, eyes fixed to the screen, she says no thanks. I say what do you mean no thanks?? And she says I don’t want to. Mama, I already did Happy Numbers this morning.

She is totally, completely over it.

So I cajole, and drag, and get a bit testy, and then short-tempered, and we eventually grit our teeth through ten minutes of something or other, and as soon as my next session starts she drifts back upstairs to her new best friend, iPad. And really, why shouldn’t she? It’s way more comfortable than sitting alone, trying to slog through a worksheet, and listening to me lavish attention on someone else on the other side of the door.

If Mike were here it would be so much better. Before the cemetery yesterday, it was less painful for my mind to tell me thank goodness Mike isn’t here and we don’t have to go through that too rather than hold the truth, which is that Mike was a great dad, a great teacher, a great introvert, and basically a great all around candidate for successful family sheltering-in-place. We used to joke (sort of, ha ha) that he should have been a monk. I can imagine him boasting about how well-suited to this life of confinement he would be. (I can also imagine him obsessing over the news, pacing around the house, driving me a bit batty - which wouldn't detract from the suitedness.) The things that freak me out right now - too much screen time, a growing negative association with school, loneliness, losing academic skills, the weight of depression and inertia threatening on the periphery, the sheer effort involved in making sure everyone gets outside, gets exercised, gets one-on-one time with me, connects with friends, and helps take care of our home - these things would be transformed from existential threats into mere challenges if Mike were here to share the responsibility of them all with me. It is so hard alone.

Because being in the cool wet thereness of the cemetery allowed more space for what I really feel, which is that in this pandemic I want Mike here more than ever, I am less afraid of losing Mike. The truth hurts; the truth consoles.

good friday

I woke up this morning with a strange, empty feeling. I watched the tiny cracks of light through the closed blinds move with the wind and clouds outside, listened to my quiet house, my quiet street, rolled onto my back and rested my hands on my hip bones, unwilling to make any move at all that would result in leaving the safety and stillness of my bed. Good Friday. All was dim, all was hushed. 

I eventually did. I leaned over and wheelbarrowed my hands and upper body to reach my phone that was charging nearby on the rug, hauled myself back into bed, and started reading emails and the terrible news, as is my wont, until it felt all wrong and I finally got up with vague thoughts about shaking off this darkness with various productive things that I should be doing before the children woke up and I had to begin my work day.

I went down the stairs and to the kitchen door, as I do every morning, behind which the cats were huddled and pressed, eagerly awaiting my approach. When I opened the door they fell forward out of it, as they do every morning, immediately meowing, looking up at me with wide desperate eyes, rubbing against my ankles and generally communicating their intolerably acute hunger for breakfast. I fed them. I drank a glass of water and made coffee. I watched the sky outside the tiny window. I could not commit to any of my productivity agenda items.

So I sat down at the kitchen table with my phone and opened Spotify and played John Prine. I had been avoiding that, I think, ever since I read he was in the ICU. Am I a huge fan? Not really. But so many of his songs were part of the tender soundtrack of many summers at my very special UU camp in Western North Carolina, a deeply formative place for me. I never learned the verses; I could only sing along to the choruses, but I always did so with a lot of heart. 

And Daddy, won't you take me back to Muhlenberg County

Down by the Green River, where paradise lay

It took about four seconds of hearing that song before the tears came. They came and came, with an intensity I haven't felt for awhile, the kind of grief wave that one can only submit to and ride until it has crashed on some other shore from the one you started out standing on. I rested my head and arms on the smooth wood of the kitchen table, clean because Gabriel wiped it down last night after dinner, aglow in the morning sun, and I cried. The tears weren't just for John Prine and his evocative story-songs, they were for my children who miss their friends, for my clients who are mourning and can't give and receive hugs of comfort, for doctors and nurses, for people who are alone, for my childhood, for cities living in fear, for all the parts of me I have sometimes wanted to push aside, for the smell and feel of a rhododendron forest in North Carolina. I cried for all the losses, every one of which is a feathery part of a vast root system whose taproot is my own deepest grief. Mike. Dad. Come back. Come back and hear this beautiful song.

Well I'm sorry my son, but you're too late in asking

Mr. Peabody's coal train has hauled it away.

notes on a quarantine, week three

Now: Gabriel is playing guitar upstairs, the many voices of Beatrice’s classmates are echoing in the kitchen during a school meeting, Frances’s thoughts are quietly whirring in the living room with Little Women on her lap (we trade it back and forth, she rereading it and Beatrice and I reading it aloud, usually on the front porch after I’ve finished work for the day, wrapped in a blanket as the sun sets where Walnut St ends in a T at Race Avenue, down the hill from our house), and I am responding to student emails and planning out the remote therapy session schedule for the rest of the week. My thoughts bounce around: when will we be able to take a walk today, how to plan Beatrice’s activities during my next two sessions this afternoon, how to keep Gabriel from the cave of his room for extended periods, can we finish a birthday card for a friend before the salt-and-pepper weathered handsome mail carrier arrives, will the coffee will be kind and stretch itself magically and not run out before I am ready to again address grocery-acquisition, how can we resume our fun outdoor workouts with our neighborhood friends in a safe way (as the track at the college has become overcrowded, impossible to properly distance oneself now). I imagine the contents of my mind are a lot like yours. How will we secure our simple pleasures, how will we make it through the small challenges of today?

This week has, so far, been much better than last, when the stress of remote school and work starting in earnest had me at my wit’s end, or to be more specific crying my eyes out at least once a day in a fit of overwhelm. I am not a doctor, nor a delivery person, an epidemiologist, a grocery store worker, a nurse, a sanitation worker - I am none of these present-moment heroes, and I have had to sacrifice very little. But this is hard. It’s really hard. I think it’s okay to recognize that others’ burdens are immense, and still name and share our own feelings: sadness, isolation, frustration. As my dad would often remind me, there’s no comparing pain. We all have some, that’s all there is to know; so be compassionate when you can, to yourself and everyone else, too.

I’ve been thinking about him a lot, and dreaming often of Mike. Weird, vaguely upsetting dreams mostly. I have a lot of latent cancer-and-immediate grief-era fears that have been stirred up by the threat of this virus living everywhere. (That’s maybe a thing anyone who has gone through trauma or loss recently can understand.) But the normal emotional difficulties of being a parent, a therapist, a friend, a widow, a human sometimes feel extra difficult right now. So many normal life avenues like seeing a friend unexpectedly, making eye contact (video chatting, incidentally, does not provide proper eye contact!), hugging, stepping easily onto a neighbor’s porch, meeting for coffee, resting a heavy head on a welcoming shoulder, these usual gestures of connection and care that allow regular old moments of fear, sadness, and conflict to move through a person peacefully - that help us digest the shifting challenges of a Tuesday afternoon - these mundane moments of microhealing are no longer there for us. It’s just me, my feelings, my kids, and my kitchen. We have to hold it all somehow, and then find new ways to let it go.

Some things that have helped this week: lowered expectations, particularly of my ability to oversee school activities while working and my kids’ abilities to stay focused and productive while I am unavailable, small domestic routines I’ve been working on establishing like lunchtime walk/jogs with Beatrice on her scooter and daily chores and kids’ dinner-making nights, the purchase of a new iPad to bring our person-to-screen ratio to a far more functional 1:1, digging into domestic pleasures like gardening and baking, long walks without the kids, and too-long hot showers (also without the kids) (okay, actually sometimes Beatrice slides in, which I begrudgingly allow because someone has to make sure the shampoo gets properly rinsed out). Oh, and taking advantage of every shred of sunshine that we can.

But nothing makes up for the loss of tight-squeeze bear hugs, which I now realize I typically enjoy multiple times a day, because I am very lucky and surrounded by people I adore in my usual home-work-school life. My kids are all excellent huggers, but my widows out there especially know one’s children cannot take the place of an affectionate adult.

Beatrice has been attending Sunday School via Zoom over the past two weeks, and during the story of Jesus’s life, told with striking illustrated cards in muted colors, the teacher lingered over an image of Jesus’s thumbs gently pushing on the eyes of a blind man. When Jesus touched people, he changed them, she said. They were never the same again.

I miss touching, and being touched. I miss the change wrought in me with every hand squeeze and arm graze and knee knock.

I miss you.

two

Before Mike died, church was our Sunday morning default. My kids were acolytes and children's choir participants and long ago, when Frances was a baby, Mike and I were youth group leaders. After he died nothing was the same, and nothing was less the same than my children's attitudes towards church and God. I won't speak for them, but suffice it to say, I don't believe forcing children to do something they feel strongly opposed to is a great way to foster warm, safe feelings about said thing. I find myself the lone member of my family who still feels at home in a pew. As I am never alone, going to church by myself is nice. But I miss the kids snuggled next to me. And worry I am handling this all wrong for them. And that Mike's worst fears are all coming true. Thus every Sunday morning, because I am unsettled about this, I am pulled in a number of directions, uncertain which is most right.

Sometimes I go to church on Saturday evening and take the kids out to breakfast on Sunday. Sometimes I drag a complaining Beatrice with me to church. Sometimes I go to yoga class with friends and on my way out the door say next week, please, will you guys join me at church, knowing they will not. Sometimes I let everyone sleep in and I read the paper in the quiet and nothing really happens at all - I just think about various scenarios happening and then in the end make pancakes and sit around and drink coffee and talk with my kids instead.

May I point out that all of these Sunday mornings seem pretty decent to me, each meeting some very real needs? And the religious education problem is uncomfortable, and definitely counts as a problem, but it's not as tormenting as it once was. I'm trying to take the long view. And I'm trying to forgive myself for not knowing what to do about it, for needing and sometimes taking time for myself, for not having the energy to put much time or thought into it - besides the last minute handwringing on Sunday, twenty minutes before the service begins.

What I want for myself is to feel the receptive space within me, to know it is still there and hasn't been elbowed out by parent-teacher conferences and social media and remembering not to forget snacks for rehearsal and messing up my schedule at work and worries about people I care about traveling during a global pandemic. Church and yoga are both good for that.

So today it was yoga. And as I may have mentioned here before, about 90% of the savasanas I have practiced since I lost my husband end in tears. Like, it doesn't matter what was just on my mind or how good or bad I felt during class, the moment I settle in, flat on my back and exposed to all the universe, something shifts, my chest and throat tighten, and all I can do is try not to distract the yogis around me with audible sobs.

On a recent Sunday morning the teacher gently suggested we slowly scan our bodies for points of tension in order to release more fully into the pose. Instead my mind began to slowly scan Mike's body, starting with his marvelous stubby hairy toes and moving up to his skinny calves, eventually lingering on his clavicle, his shoulders, his cheekbones, his eyes. I cried and cried, for the preciousness of him.

Today, as I let my heavy legs relax and roll outwards and tucked my poky shoulder blades under my back, I remember thinking that I totally wasn't going to cry this time. Not happening, no way. I felt a bit detached, pleasantly tired, far from any kind of intense emotion. Neutral.

But then my mind began to wander back into the church dilemma, to my heathen children bickering at home and my dead husband sighing in disappointment, and in the midst of all that discomfort I was suddenly struck by a dreamy yet vivid vision - the kind that only happens in savasana - and it was Jesus. He was kneeling just behind and to the left side of me, gently stroking my forehead.

The aching, grieving part of me rose to the surface to feel his cool, smooth fingers soothe the tension from my head. The self-doubting and ashamed part of me felt Him reach over my shoulder and put a hand on my heart, and in my mind I covered it with my own hand, trying not to clutch, and cried, awash in that tenderness and compassion, and in my own tears, and in gratitude for something new growing in me.

I don't care if God sent me that vision, or I conjured it out of a need for some forgiveness, or to reassure myself that it's okay, really, I can be receptive to God wherever and however I am, because maybe those things aren't really in conflict with one another. Maybe they are all versions of the same thing.

It will be two years this Thursday. I've been more exposed, more pierced by the brute facts of what we went through over the past weeks. But I have also had occasion to confront some of the challenges we faced in our marriage in a more open, wholehearted way, a way I wasn't able to a year ago, or even four months ago, because it threatened my sense of safety in the world. I couldn't bear to consider and embrace it all, including our struggles and the responsibility I had in those, because I feared it would invalidate our lives together, the person I was and the person I am. If I fully admitted to our problems, would it mean I loved him less, loved him wrong?

But now I'm not afraid. I feel a peacefulness that I don't quite understand about all the parts of who we were together, maybe even most especially the extremely imperfect ones, and I find myself telling the truth about those to dear friends who patiently listen, helping me to discover things about my own extremely imperfect self that I am only now learning because I was too afraid to confront them when Mike was alive, or at the very least before he got sick.

And so my moment with Jesus's healing hands today felt like a vivid expression of a kind of grace I have been noticing and definitely not taking for granted lately. You can't really forgive someone, including yourself, if you don't bring the truth of what they did or didn't do into the light. And so I feel as if I've been looking at Mike, and myself, in the morning sunlight. What is revealed isn't always pretty, but I still love us very much. I also forgive us. I forgive Mike, I forgive me. And that gesture, of pulling darker things into the light, and blessing them all the same, has brought me a new peace that I am holding with the awe and lightness of touch that I would a baby bird. It is delicate, beautiful, mysterious, very likely about to fly off somewhere else, but I will know it was here always.

We've nearly made it two years. I never could have envisioned what this moment would be like, the toddlerhood of my grief. I'm definitely sturdier on my legs; walking is no big deal now. I can even run sometimes, though I do fall often and sometimes barrel into things which I immediately regret. I'm quick to cry, rather self-involved, and always seem to need help. I talk a lot. I can't have everything I want, and I want so much, and that's hard. I respond with my whole broken being to reassurance, an open blue sky, music, a flock of snow geese, a soothing hand on my brow. Acts of love. Sunshine. A beloved face. The arrival of spring.

When the older children were little, Mike and I used to comment knowingly to other parents that three is the new two. Like, it's the terrible threes, not the terrible twos! A parent really should enjoy two while she can. But my own infant widowhood, always terrible, is also becoming, so strange and unsettling as I enter this third year, increasingly spacious, surprising, peaceful. I did not expect my persistent pain to gradually and gently invite a more fuller, more accepted, more messed-up me to emerge. Yet here I am.