bright morning star

Last night, in a mad competitive rush for second helpings of an unusual and prized dish around here, one enormous gooey baked mac-and-cheese comprising shocking amounts of butter, cheddar, and gruyere which I couldn't not know about after having made it, one of the four dinner plates broke. We began with six, a gift from my mother after I admired their hand-painted dogwood design in a second hand shop many years ago. Now we have three! Yet we are four. And we should be five. Only three plates! What kind of family can't set a proper table?

Also I dropped my phone Tuesday, when I stupidly took it out to return a text while walking Ramona who predictably lunged for a squirrel at exactly the wrong moment, and now the screen is completely shattered and held in place with two strips of packing tape. I've missed multiple school meetings this week as well as street cleaning/car moving, a handful of emails, and a dentist bill. I forgot Gabriel's well-planned and oft-reminded-about bunk reunion for his special grief camp from last summer. I forgot things I still haven't realized I've forgotten.

Pandemics bring out the worst in me. I know, I know, in all of us - and it's not that we're bad, it's that we're overtaxed and bereft of routines and need human contact to feel normal. So we forget where our keys are and don't show up to meetings. I know. But it feels shitty. It triggers my childhood fear of being imperfect and thus unloveable.

A deeper grief still slips out during my morning walks with Ramona the dog. (I happened to have sought out and adopted Ramona for the express purpose of ameliorating our emotional challenges. Ah well.) Those walks make me wonder if all my surface level fretting about screwing everything up is just to distract me from this particular pain: walking the streets of this town, this neighborhood, being tugged along by my sweet new pup through the hushed morning air, I always seem to wind up on bittersweet corners. I walk by our old house, where my family lived happily, raucously together, and where my dad died in a hospital bed in the living room when I was eighteen years old. I walk by the first house I lived in with Mike, when we had one tiny baby named Frances and he grew a tidy garden. I lost them in the prime of their lives - they were healthy, powerful men, the center of my world, and I had to watch them become sick and die right here.

What the fuck Meagan, you might say. (I say that too.)

Or you might, as Gabriel, observe that God really does keep on smiting you, Mama.

To which I counter, honestly, that I had the very best dad and the very best husband for me in the whole wide world. That doesn't feel like being smited. That feels like fantastic good fortune.

But on those walks the grief over having lost the very best people hits me with an inexplicable freshness. It's searing. Sometimes I cry. This morning, instead, I found myself singing.

bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
bright morning stars are rising
day is a-breaking 
in my soul

If you know that song, you know it is a lament, and a quiet celebration too. Oh where are our dear fathers is a bewildered, broken question that hangs and lingers, but then the song comes back again and again to the only answer that makes any sense: day is a-breaking in my soul. 

That's how I feel, walking my dog on the new-day streets of my city where my favorite people died. Cracked open to my grief, and with it the beauty of the pandemic-quiet, the spring that has stepped into full array, the chattering squirrels that Ramona runs after, the neighbors in tight pants and sneakers walking briskly in pairs. Sometimes I have wondered why I didn't take my children and run far away from this landscape that speaks so many painful stories. I think: who would stay here and keep walking these paths?

But it is all very precious to me. I don't want to leave it. On our walks I feel as I did in the early months of widowhood: alien, broken, awed. Like then, the late nights and the early mornings hurt the most. The pain of the whole world pushes on me.

I come home with Ramona and make myself coffee and feed her breakfast and we walk up the two flights of stairs together to wake Gabriel and then Beatrice as the rawness subsides and my day of carrying and anchoring others begins. I make breakfast, and then like parents everywhere I organize Beatrice's schoolwork and set up the computer for her class meetings, I review Gabriel's morning work plan, I set up my own work space. At nine I retreat to the dining room, shut the doors, set my ipad on a stack of books amidst many other papers and books on the table, plug in my ear buds, and begin my first session, hoping the sounds of kids negotiating screens and the dog barking and the dishwasher running on the other side of the door aren't too distracting. I run out between sessions and drag Beatrice away from Netflix and place her before something that makes me feel less awful, say hello to Frances, remind a kid to let the dog out, answer various questions before heading back for the next session. At lunchtime we always take a walk. Sometimes I do something awesome, like yesterday when I felt compelled to bake a lemon rhubarb bundt cake in the morning and did and it was a triumph, and later was present for a very beautiful and sad culminating goodbye session with a student I've seen for a long time. After work I exercise with the kids or alone or with friends distanced outside. This evening I joined some for Zumba which I executed badly, albeit enthusiastically, before countless park-goers, enjoying how little I cared that they saw me in all my confused, hip-shaking, which-way-are-we-supposed-to-be-facing glory. Then we got take-out pizza to celebrate the completion of Frances's first (of three) online AP exams this morning. The days roll on like this, one after another, in our very small world. I dole out hugs and tortilla chips and bandaids and songs and chores and advice and jokes and tears and funny dancing and memories and games and irritation and efforts to meet everyone's needs and help them feel heard and seen. Sometimes I have a pretty good time. Sometimes I feel like a total fuck up. But overall, it goes okay.

Until late, when the last kid is finally in bed, and I stand in the bathroom drying off after a shower or in my underwear with a toothbrush in my mouth and see my own reflection looking back at me, and she is a little confused - what exactly happened here? - and the loneliness comes rushing back. Then I am filled with a scoured out tenderness so deep and so wide that it seems my skin and muscles and bones cannot possibly contain it.

But they do. I never break. I crack and stretch and ache; I expand. It hurts, but I know I am making more space to endure the quiet beauty of the world when I wake tomorrow, click on Ramona's leash, and open the front door.

say yes

Ramona the dog is actually eating. A little. We just got back from our morning walk, our third-ever morning walk, in the early quiet of a pandemic spring morning after a day of ceaseless rain, when all felt washed clean, the cloudy filtered light hitting the wet pink dogwood petals just so, and a scant few runners and fellow dog walkers and even fewer cars shared the streets with us. We adopted her on Tuesday evening, from the Delaware Humane Association. She is nine months old and since her arrival on West Walnut Street has been too excited, overwhelmed, and busy sniffing to be very interested in food or water.

But slowly that's changing. And slowly the cats are considering the possibility that she might be here for good. Beatrice is too. We shared her arrival on Facebook and everyone has been kind and congratulatory; on our walks we always see someone we know who shouts from the other side of the street: the new puppy! Hooray!! So many people have asked things like what made you cave? or you finally gave in, huh? but the truth is that I wanted this dog. The kids were ambivalent. I have wanted this dog since ...well, since the spring of 2015, before Mike got sick, when I was scrambling to rent our house and get us ready to go to England, and Beatrice was just-two. I told Mike we had to do it when we got back from his sabbatical year, when potty training would be a fading memory and his tenure meant we would be in Annapolis for the very long haul (he loved to imagine being a tutor at St. John's well into his seventies; the example set by older tutors who continued to teach and mentor inspired him). A dog could roam our big backyard and delight the children for years and years.

Amazingly, he agreed. What was amazing about his agreement is this: Mike had the most special dog in the world when he was little. Ralph. When he lost his beloved old Ralph at the tender age of six, he made a vow that he would never love another dog again. True to Mike's singleminded, veering-into-obsessive determination, he never did. But at forty, his heart was ready to open the dog-door back up. Just one more of those secondary losses; Mike never got to love our family's dog.

I think he'd be cool with Ramona. Her puppy energy would test him, for sure. But she's a lovely dog, who stops to sniff red fire hydrants and look longingly, ears perked and head cocked questioningly, at other dogs she wants to play with on our walks. I watch her and think: she's acting so doggy. Is this dog really our dog??

I advocated for her starting about two weeks after Mike died. The kids were initially game, and we planned to adopt in the summer, when I was off work. But gradually it became clear that what with selling and buying a house, our general grief-laden state of semi-functionality, lots of travel, and the kids’ aversion to chores, a new dog made zero sense. We adopted the kittens instead, who as you may know have provided us with an inexhaustible source of joy ever since, and limped along as best we could. Every time I revisited The Dog Question, the children would, with varying levels of intensity, object. We’re not ready, they said. Beatrice is afraid of dogs, and the older kids told me in no uncertain terms that I already had too much on my plate, we’re a busy family, and if we had a dog I would nag them incessantly about taking better care of it (“because we’re lazy, Mama”) and wind up doing too much myself, making me even more snappish and grumpy. The overall stress level in the house, already too high, would creep higher still. It would be disastrous.

Well, that’s possible. I don’t even care! I wanted a dog! A panting sniffing smiling muddy-pawed exasperating adorable mutt. Animals make me happy; they always have. I forgive them for pooping. Picking it up seems a reasonable price to pay for their shaggy sweet company.

Maybe widowhood is lonely. And losing a parent is hard. And facing your fears is empowering. And tapping extra love that we all have on reserve can be healing. It’s a lot of pressure to put on Ramona’s furry shoulders but I think she can handle it. This strange time, along with its terribleness, has offered me a number of unexpected gifts: time for noticing, gratitude for the natural world, freedom from our car and too-busy schedule that driving said car facilitates, long walks, fresh attunement to my grief, dance classes in the kitchen, appreciation for my community. Now Ramona joins the list. A doggy dog who will invite more love, more freak outs, more delight, more frustration, more nagging, more playing, more life into our tender family. I say yes to that.
 

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.