hello future, meet the past

I had a long overdue mammogram this afternoon in the dread Suburban Pavillion outpatient medical center, which is connected to the Cancer Institute by a long shiny hallway that features blocks of rainbow colors on one white wall and long open windows overlooking a parking lot on the other. The entrance to the Center for Breast Health (what a weird assemblage of words) is next to that hall, and to the diagnostic imaging area. 

How many hours did we spend waiting for PET scans and chest x-rays in that open, exposed waiting area, listening to the incessant fountain nearby and watching parents hover over their small children while they hurtled wishing pennies into it with awkward toddler gusto? And how many times did little Beatrice dance down that long inviting white hallway from the Cancer end of things? I would take her for walks to occupy her while we waited for Mike's radiation or chemo to end. She was tickled by the colors.

So was it so weird that when I walked out of the Center for Breast Health, with flattened breasts basically unharmed and hopefully healthy, I turned and headed down the rainbow hall, tugged by habit and a compulsion to visit the past? The fluorescent lights bounced off the linoleum underfoot and the moon was full and rising to my left in the pale purple sky, shining above the cars and scattered ultrasound technicians and administrative assistants and nurses that were hunched against the cold in masks and coats, walking towards them. I traveled the entire hall without thinking much about what I would do when I reached the end of it, until my toes touched a line of thick blue tape and my eyes noticed a sign that said I could not cross it unless screened by a Cancer Institute staff person. 

Well, of course. No one belongs in that space who isn't a patient, caregiver, or medical staff person. I've often thought about people going through what we did now - how much scarier it must be, going in for treatment, battling low white blood cell counts, gauging which fevers to do something about, all within the heightened anxiety cauldron of the pandemic. 

So I stopped. I peered into the Cancer Institute territory, which was calm and quiet. There were no humans to speak of in any direction. I wondered what I would have done if the blue tape hadn't stopped me. Visit the nurses at the infusion center? Check in on the green treatment team downstairs and see if anyone remembered me? Say a cheerful happy new year to everyone through my mask, patients in wheelchairs and therapy dogs and receptionists alike?

But they wouldn't know me. I wouldn't know them. It will be three years in March. And why would anyone want to revisit a chapter of life dominated by cancer treatment, anyway? A person who spent nearly all of that chapter with her husband who is no longer here, maybe. A person who still wonders what exactly happened then, and how, and why it happened too, and is visited by vivid memories of it all at least once a day.

But even though it never leaves me, I can never really go back to it. I sent a holiday card to our old doctor in New York and to the nurse team at the hospital because I'm not ready to let go of those people and places, but my time with them is complete. Bea doesn't remember dancing down that hallway. Frances is thinking about college, and Gabriel is now taller than Mike was. I've gained weight, I sleep at night, the smile lines on my face deepen. Many good and beautiful things keep happening. Time is so strange.

Our family has changed, the staff at the Cancer Institute has surely changed too. The whole world has changed! The pandemic experience in some ways feels like my own writ universal: stress, disease, confinement, isolation, uncertainty, and now, after so much worry and loss, we are all looking to an unknown future with some true hope, not really knowing where we are going or how we will be transformed but trusting nonetheless. 

I get my vaccine tomorrow. 

Happy new year, everyone. I'm taking my mask off to say it, I'm smiling, I really, really mean this: I'm grateful to be moving forward towards the unknown future with all of you.

dogs help

After dinner the other night, I hit a parenting wall. I can't recreate what exactly happened, but I know we were sitting around the table talking before cleanup had begun, and the conversation turned to more painful subjects. There was anger and accusation and open resentment. I'm pretty sure it got ugly, fast. I stood up at a high tension moment to move a pan into the sink and hide my face from my kids, but they could tell I was about to cry, replete with my own barely contained frustration and anger and coming-up-emptiness. I remember that I felt I had nothing. No idea how to handle this argument. I thought it best to stay silent. 

But they could see that I was crumbling. Frances suddenly pivoted and suggested I take a break and go upstairs, they could finish cleaning up. I looked at her blankly. What?

I decided to accept the role of ineffectual broken-down mother and went to my room, where I found Ramona the dog sprawled luxuriously across a pile of clean laundry on my bed. She lifted her head and looked at me standing in the doorway with her soulful eyes for a long spell, then let her head drop back down heavily, exhausted by the effort of momentarily holding it up. This gesture got me. I knew just how she felt. I crawled across the underwear and socks and t shirts until I lined myself up against her back and slid an arm across her warm ribcage. I cried into the little space between her shoulder blades, which happens to be one of my favorite parts of Mike's body, and that made me cry harder.

My dog rolled on her back to face me, belly mostly up (a favorite position, always hoping for a rub) and put her sinewy bony forepaws around me while I cried and yes, scratched her belly. We stayed like that, entangled, and I let all the thoughts come and go in the safety of her doggie embrace. They need Mike. I can't do this alone. I usually feel like I'm doing an okay job as a parent but what if that is a lie I tell myself, what if I am letting them down? What if they need a stronger leader at the helm? What if I indulge them too much? What if I am the weaker parent, and weaker still without Mike's sensibility and presence to inform me? What if 50% of what they once had is simply not enough? 

My dog was the only being in the world I could have tolerated with me at that moment. The aloneness of widowed parenting in these moments of doubt, of not knowing, of wishing desperately for my partner with whom I once shared the responsibility and path-forward-making, is something that reliably shakes me deeply. There is no one alive on this planet who knows and loves our babies like Mike. Only silent, simple, soulful Ramona could have comforted and held me like that. I'm not sure how I managed before, without her.

Gabriel recently commented during a trip to Market that sometimes I treat them more like a grandparent than a parent, getting them all the empanadas and donuts and chocolate milks they ask for, clearly taking pleasure in the indulgence of it all. Oof. That didn't sound great to my ears. They're soft! I'm soft. I started spoiling all of us after Mike died (Who cares? Papa died was a frequent refrain) and once the pandemic hit I cranked it up a few notches. Who cares, it's a pandemic! This is hard, we deserve chocolate milk. And nice beer, and staying up late, and movies, and a huge bowl of popcorn drenched in butter and salt. 

Griefing, parenting. Maybe I've gotten a little too confident lately. I've been all I got this, occasionally looking back and considering how bonecrushingly hard everything was two years ago, one year ago, and reassuring myself that I somehow survived that pain and am in a new phase of our lives. Whew! Good thing that's over. I'm so normal now! But c'mon, who am I kidding? The holidays are upon us, my bones still ache, and the absurd brute unfathomable fact of the death of someone I love, someone my children love, still makes it hard to breathe. 

I'm still afraid of the questions my children ask that I cannot possibly answer, the sorrow they bear that I cannot relieve. I'm still afraid of the holidays. I'm afraid of sustaining and adapting traditions in a way that will fall short of honoring Mike, a great lover of Christmas and general wholesome festivity. Last year we opted to skip it rather than face the wrongness of Mike's absence around the tree; we had a fabulous time in Jamaica instead. 

I do think I'm ready to be here this year. (Good thing, as we can't escape to the Caribbean anyway). In so many ways we are  in a new phase of our lives. We're finding a way to be a family, to be who we are, to grow and change without registering frequent bouts of panic over the inevitable fact of time carrying us farther away from the family and people we were when Mike was alive. There's just occasional panic these days. But there's no being done with our grief. There's no nestling it into a quiet drawer that we close because everything's okay now. It's never okay. We're finding a way to live in the world with the not-okayness, and love it all anyway, love it even more tenderly and ragingly than we did before. 

Thank goodness for Ramona.

open the gates

Six months after Mike died I bought this house. The move - bringing the remains of our old house in Annapolis whose contents we had stored three years earlier, just before Mike was diagnosed, and the household we'd built over the intervening crisis-laden years in Lancaster - was an effort I found so emotionally and physically taxing that at times it felt simply impossible. My knees would buckle and I'd figure it was time to give up, leave the chaos and the artifacts of another life all around me where they lay, and pitch a tent in the backyard. Just call it quits. Too hard, never mind. Kids, start looking for the sleeping bags...they must be around here somewhere. 

About two weeks after we'd moved, I had a vivid dream. Mike was walking through the new house, looking around in dismay, at times in anger, asking me things like why did you get rid of the desk? this room is so small; didn't you realize the couch wouldn't fit? what were you thinking, buying this house? 

In my dream he hated it. In my waking life I hated that he had never lived in it, and now we did.

Last night I had another such dream; Mike was on the periphery during a weird dream-logic vacation and my only direct contact with him involved him being upset with me, noting ways I had changed, responding with some judgment. In the dream moment I remembered that I had a boyfriend. I didn't want to upset my husband so I decided not to mention it. But I couldn't hide the fact that I wasn't the same person he had been married to, because his death had changed me. He could tell, and he didn't like it. 

Terrible dream. Awful. My waking mind does not for a minute think Mike is upset with me for changing. I don't even think he cares too much about the boyfriend; I really do believe he wants me to be supported and happy. But I struggle with accepting these things. My brain twists them into painful narratives at night. 

And yet I notice changes happening inside me, without even trying to make them happen, and I notice that they are good. Beautiful, even. Life is hard as heck but I feel good about my work, my parenting, my friendships; I am kinder to my own body. And then a little part of me says but how can you be more you, more expansive, more accepting of yourself, after losing Mike?! And even scarier: did losing Mike enable you to become more fully yourself? 

And what would that mean about me, about my marriage, about Mike, about us, if it did? 

When my mom had a hysterectomy in her early 50s, she had not yet begun the process of menopause in earnest. After the trauma of that surgery - after an organ in her body that had reminded her of her own fertility for decades, had housed my and my sister's growing bodies and spirits, and had stretched and twisted under the insistent heft of fibroids was removed in a moment with cold metal instruments - menopause was kicked into high gear. She got thrown into it hard, and there was no turning back. She had to figure out how to respond to hot flashes on the fly. 

If her uterus had not been taken suddenly from her body, she would have eased into that change over a span of years. She would have wound up on the other shore eventually; the journey would have been remarkably different.

I think what is happening to me is something like that. My husband was taken from me. He was a person I knew intimately, like an organ in my own body, a part of me so essential that I did not know who I was without him. I fell in love with him when I was an uncertain twenty year old woman-child. There was a lot about myself I didn't like then. He seemed to love me anyway, but I was afraid to expose that darker shameful stuff to the light of his gaze any more than necessary. I loved being in love with him; I didn't want anything about either of us, especially me, to screw it up.

Much later in our years together, those pushed-aside bits started to emerge, to insist on being part of the conversation. Quietly, mostly in the background but also occasionally in loud and inconvenient and interpersonally painful ways, I was trying to change. To brave friction, disappointment. When Mike got sick, that process inside me, that becoming more me, was interrupted, complicated, somehow both sped up and slowed down. 

If being more fully myself would better support him in those awful times, I was into it. Up for the challenge of more honesty, more connection, more vulnerability. If it seemed like swallowing my own pain or anger or hurt would be easier, which was often the case with a beloved man who periodically lost hair and weight and the ability to speak and could barely swallow anything at all, it was hard. I mostly opted for honesty anyway, because I couldn't bear to feel any alienation between us. I'm not sure it was always the right move.

Then he was ripped from my body. Taken from me in a moment. I was thrown into the cold disorientation of grief and there was no way out but through. Actually there is no way out, not really, but there are ways to move forward. And I think after the initial months of shock, the uncomfortable process of being more myself that had hesitatingly begun before Mike's illness was thrown into high gear. Because what else could I do? Who else could I be? I could no longer take refuge within the structures of my marriage. There was nowhere else to turn. 

It was just me in here, and it freaked me the fuck out. 

I have to tell a story about it, you guys. I have to tell and retell this one. (You're thinking no duh, Meagan). I have to figure out why it's okay that I feel less shame and more openness about who and what I am now than I ever did when my husband was alive, when my life fit into easier, more comfortable compartments, when decisions weren't so wide open, when my own values and inclinations and wisdom were integrated within a two-person system. 

I started seeing a therapist, someone adept in the therapeutic approach I've been learning about and utilizing with my own clients over the past two months. In our session yesterday we somehow ended with the image of a gate, the metal kind used to corral animals maybe, like in a rural English village or Vermont farm, rather bucolic, a gate the swings wide on its hinges and opens onto a meadow, green and lush in the autumn evening light. I like the sound of it squeaking a bit as it opens outward. 

I would like to leave the gate wide open like that, always. I would like my mind to learn to make space for truer and gentler dreams. 

mindful moment

I co-led my first mindfulness class of the semester last Thursday, which is, I think it is fair to say, a total scam, as I am a miserable mindfulness devotee and will choose the maelstrom of my thoughts and attendant emotions over cultivating my inner witness 99 times out of a 100. Okay, that's not totally accurate, because I wish I would sit and meditate more, I really do. Maybe my leading Mindful U could be considered aspirational rather than fraudulent. 

I like teaching it in part because for four weeks I have to keep a daily log of mindfulness activities, just like the students, and this built-in accountability helps convince me to cut the crap and just sit down already. 

Even so, I missed Friday and Saturday's required ten minutes of practice, but I did think about it, specifically when I could create a regular, sustainable time in my day during which to meditate, and came up with a great idea: after dinner, I would leave my kids cleaning up the kitchen and slip upstairs to my bedroom, settling onto the floor in the carpeted alley between my bed and the window overlooking my back door and deck, facing the pothos sitting on the bedside table whose drawer holds Mike's watch and cologne and glasses, the plant that once hung from the ceiling in a tasteful macrame net and that I haven't been able to - or rather even tried to - rehang after the plaster fell away around the ceiling hook. While I sat with intention and awareness, the kids would learn to get it done, as I often suggest they do, just get it done please, without me there to complain to when one child is perceived to be avoiding her duties or the sink is full of pre-dinner dishes that none of them apparently have created and eschew all responsibility for. It would go so much better if I weren't there urging them on, and I would be motivated to practice if it meant a smoother post-dinner clean up. 

So after our frittata and tomatoes and cucumbers I explained that I simply had to meditate, and I would be back in ten minutes to help them finish up. I ran up the back stairs to my room and shut the door. I slid Mike's meditation bench out from beneath the table that holds the plant, and opened Insight Timer on my phone. I set the time and proceeded to slide my shins beneath the bench, straighten my spine, and exhale. Yes. Meditating. Making time for me. I love this. Right? I love this.

Within about thirty seconds my children began reciting Hamilton lyrics together at the top of their lungs. Their voices floated out of the open kitchen door below and filled the cool air around our house. The sound, along with clinking dishes and running water, traveled up to me in a way that made their voices sound particularly human, particularly like themselves. I laughed. Oh my god, I love them. They are so funny. 

Wait! Wait just a minute, I'm meditating here. Inhale, exhale.

They then blasted the actual soundtrack to sing along to. I felt vaguely jealous that I was missing out on the fun scene in the kitchen. I couldn't stop my brain from singing along silently too. 

Brah, brah I'm Hercules Mulligan/Up in it, lovin' it, yes I heard your mother say come again

Oof, no. That is, I guess, something I will label thinking.

I heard Ramona roll against my closed door and commence methodically chewing away on her squeakiest toy. 

Hello, breath. Back to the breath.

I heard Beatrice scream at her brother and sister to turn it down, they were being too loud.

I noticed my back aching. Like, all over. Oh man. Does anyone not start to feel extremely uncomfortable about 94 seconds into seated meditation?

My phone chirped many times in a row, in such a way that I knew the texts were from the man I am dating as his staccato voice-to-text style always comes through in multiple parts. 

Thinking, Meagan. 

Don't modulate the key then not debate with me/Why should a tiny island across the sea regulate the price of tea? 

I tried focusing on the feeling of my hands resting on my thighs instead of my breath. 

I then felt the air whoosh against my back as my bedroom door suddenly flung open behind me and Beatrice ran in, standing over me, her long hair tickling my shoulders.

I am sorry Mama, but there is an emergency right now and you are still just SITTING HERE meditating!! Ramona pulled the modem off the shelf by its cord and now the internet is probably broken!

I mustered all my focus and kept on noticing that I was breathing and tried not to smile and kept my eyes closed.

Mama!!! Come ON!

Beatrice, I quietly responded, I am still meditating. My timer has not gone off yet. 

But you've been up here for at least an hour!

Then I did smile. And told her I'd be there just as soon as my ten minutes were up. She ran out, exasperated.

But while we were engaged in this exchange, the door was open, and Ramona ran in and leapt onto my bed next to me, her panting face level with mine. That made me remember I still needed to put clean sheets on my naked mattress.

Thinking! Another thought!

I heard Beatrice yelling again, about something indistinguishable. She sounded like she needed help. Suddenly I couldn't stand it anymore. I opened my eyes to find Ramona's inquisitive sweet doggy face inches from mine, and looked down at my phone. Somehow I'd missed the soothing chimes indicating the end of my session and had been sitting there for six extra minutes. 

Woah. I felt like a total meditation pro. I went downstairs, turned off the music in the clean kitchen to much protesting, and felt my heart animating my chest curiously, with a flutter and an ache. 

Later on, in the course of getting-ready-for-bed conversation, Frances casually observed that I have a low bar for life, which is why I'm so happy all the time. 

You'd probably make a really good Buddhist, she said. 

That made me laugh. Oh, totally. I'd be an amazing Buddhist. Just wait til I hit that bench tomorrow.