feel it all

I took the afternoon off, and went for a hike. 

It was a perfect breezy green kind of day. There were wide expanses of gray rock along the trail, and the sun made undulating shadows of the still-leafing treetops upon it like the shadows cast by suspended schools of fish moving with the tide on the sandy bottom of the ocean. I didn't see another soul, so I could stretch my sweaty arms wide, and move at the speed I wanted (rather than the pace I sensed the person in front or behind me preferred), jump off a big boulder for no reason at all, pee indiscreetly, wonder if the turkey vultures circling overhead were there for me, and generally let my thoughts move around like those gentle shadows in the breeze. 

I thought of my dad, and how he loved to crash around and yell in the sacred quiet woods. He'd run off the trail looking for a burnt-out dead tree he could easily topple with a triumphant grunt, his inner five year old who reveled in destruction and breaking rules on delightful display. Sometimes he'd holler like Tarzan. You couldn't help but smile.

Dad, I said, as I walked around a bend and was caught off guard by a beautiful window in the trees that opened onto the Susquehanna River below. Dad, my life has been so defined by loss. I'm not sure I like that very much. 

I'd been thinking of his unguarded, irrepressible him-ness, and those moments of ebullience when it would overflow. The unexpected view of the river and the birdsong and breeze gave me a tiny moment of that, my me-ness. It was like a tearing open, though the torn pieces quickly began to knit themselves back together. I've been seeing so much through that alone-filter lately.

My first post-loss relationship ended about six weeks ago. It concluded with kindness and care, which felt very right, but it left me with a renewed attunement to my widowhood, my outsider status. Oh, right. I don't hang out with other couples because I'm not part of a couple. I don't fit. So there's that, plus the more encompassing emergence we are all finding our footing in together, rejoining other humans after such a long time apart. It was just me and my kids and those closest to us defining what's 'normal' for such a long time; now we're returning to the larger community whose default mode is couples and parents, summer camp forms in which to fill the names of parent #1 and parent #2. School events and concerts where families stand in groups, and mothers and fathers exchange knowing glances over their childrens' heads. We had a long break from all that. I think I forgot we were weird.

I mean, not really. We're totally weird. And not just us; we all have our outlier moments of not-belonging. 

But there's nothing quite like grief to rudely pull you out of the flow of everyday life. And have there ever been more people grieving a recent loss around the world at the same time? All of them - all of us - standing just outside things, struck by the raw strangeness of living and dying. I think of that a lot. The collective sorrow that must be rippling, unseen, just below the surface.  

But Dad, geez. Must I be so freaking melancholy, even on this perfect day? Ever anticipating and mourning endings? I wish you were here to reflect and shine back the rest of who I am. You were so good at that.

How do we hold the endings, honor the people who should be here with us, and make lots of room -  big sky, endless vista-style room - for joy? Abundance? Ferocity? For Tarzanian outbursts and laughing too loud, for never-having-been and never-ever-being normal - in the best possible way? 

For wonder at being the person you are in this very place, in this very moment?

Luckily one doesn't really need to know how. Because when I think about it I see that life, unburdened by sorrow, bursts through with a kind of unpredictable regularity. I feel it. On a walk with the kids, in the kitchen listening to music, when a new poppy muscles it's frilly wild orange skirts out of one of those tiny furry pods in the backyard. Good lord, how do they do it? It's incredible.

I don't want my life to be defined by loss, to see through the loose fibers of a shroud. I want it all to be clear, sharp, and brilliant. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

purring

Over the course of the pandemic, the rules about sleeping in Mama's bed slackened. The allotment for Beatrice doubled, from once to twice a week. I say this as if I had nothing to do with it, as if the rules slackened themselves. As long as she remembers how to sleep in her own bed, I reassure myself, this is totally fine, even though she has been surreptitiously trying to move into my bedroom full time for awhile now. She sneaks off to my bed with an iPad when no one is paying attention, reads in a spot on the floor obscured by my bed from the vantage point of the doorway so she cannot be easily discovered when it's time to set the table, or digs into my basket of scarves when she needs to accessorize. Last night before I said goodnight I gave her a stern talking-to about respecting my space when I found some dirty dishes on my dresser - no one can bring crumbly snacks into my room Beatrice! Okay, okay, sorry, she muttered, staring at the ceiling, totally disregarding that this talk ever happened before it was even over.

And when she is asleep in my bed and I crawl under the covers - after I say goodnight to Frances and Gabriel and shut the cats in the kitchen and the dog in her crate and head upstairs to the hum of the dishwasher in the dark - I am glad that I resisted the urge to burn the old king size mattress purchased to fit a four poster frame that no bedroom has been big enough for since we moved in 2008, a bed so enormous Mike and I often commented on how ridiculous it was to have to inch and scoot across its wide expanse to find each other at night. After Mike died and I bought this new house, I felt absurd sleeping in our big bed that crowded the few other pieces of furniture in my room. Besides the scale problem, why sleep in a spot that exaggerated loneliness?

But it turns out to be an ideal bed in which to weather a pandemic. There's room for the dog to nap, for the whole family to snuggle, for just about any vaccinated friend to sleep over comfortably. And there's room for a lanky eight year old to sprawl across it in sleep and still not touch me when I slide into my side, worn out by the day and unable to tolerate anything but clean sheets grazing my skin.

But in the morning when sleep - even lackluster sleep - has worked its wonders, the sight of her body, slid down past the pillows in a nest of covers with her long hair spread out around her sweet cheek-squished face, opens up a tender nostalgia in me for a moment that is in the middle of happening. I go downstairs, I feed the cats and empty the dishwasher and help Gabriel get breakfast and pack his lunch, listen for Frances getting ready upstairs, and head back upstairs to my sleeping girl. Today I woke her by opening the blinds and pulling out clothes.

Mama?

Yes.

She stretched and reached in my direction, and as I was reluctant to start another busy weekday I dropped the pants I was about to pull on and climbed in next to her. She slid over to me, half asleep, and I felt the warm solidity of her skull nestle against my sternum, bone fitting against bone, just so. A thin arm slid around my back, her tangles tickled my neck and face, I held her heavy breathing body against mine. My heart dropped and pooled and released everything it had been holding onto inside me. I felt a contentment that defies description. It's actually amazing that I've held the line at two nights a week.

Early on in the pandemic I seemed to encounter media stories about how we really know now how much more women do at home. There are so many problems that emerge when one is in the house with your co-parent and life partner who also grew up in this dumb misogynist world all the dang time.

Those stories really broke me. I began avoiding them because they hurt. All I could think was are you fucking serious? I mean, I know what it's like to do too much at home, to live in an unequal domestic partnership. Totally sucks, definitely. Sucks even harder in a pandemic. Men, be better, okay? (Also, one quarter of women are raising kids alone and this oppressive narrative that assumes heterosexual partnership, no matter how messed up, really makes a widowed girl feel like a weirdo). But anyway. I would hear and read about these challenges from women and think: your partner is alive, and right there in your house, with you. You get to touch him. 

Because you can endure a lot when you can touch and be touched. When I think of my husband and my dad, the people I have lost and miss every day, I don't think of what I want to tell them. What is there to say? Everything and nothing. Words are just a series of strange sounds coming out of my mouth.

No, I long to speak to them with my body, to touch their singular selves with my hands, arm, face. To be enveloped and to envelop in a hug. To feel their warmth again, and that contented heart-settling together. A felt, shared sigh of peaceful nervous system entwinement, of loving connection. That is what I miss.

I've been thinking about this a lot in the past months. My heart breaks daily for my student-clients zooming class alone in their dorm rooms, far from the kind of hugs I'm talking about, for my kids who can't bear hug a friend at school, and for my friends - and really, for everyone in the whole wide world - who has lost a beloved person to Covid, unable to kiss their hands at the end, unable to cry in each others' arms in the days that followed. What deeper wells of resilience are running dry in this screen-mediated world, deprived of physical contact?

On Sunday afternoon, I plucked a tiny kitten from the engine of our friends' car. It had been trapped there all day, and a group of neighbors gathered in response to the pathetic meows we could hear coming from under the hood. We tried tempting it out with food, cream, and an alluring piece of purple yarn, but the poor scared thing just backed itself further into the awful black engine-forest. In the end our friend disassembled part of the engine so we could free the kitten. When my hands closed gently around its tiny panicky body, this soft gray kitten whose distress calls had been echoing inside me all afternoon, my knees shook. I wanted to cry and laugh. It surprised me, how overwhelmed I felt, from head to toe. Such a tiny being, such a huge feeling.

As I held her against me and she quieted and even purred, my own body quickly settled too, not unlike the settling that spread inside me with nursing babies, or with a steadying gentle hand on my chest, or my dog's warm body stretched out next to me, breathing slowly in sleep. Or when I invite a student to put a comforting hand on their own body and I do the same while we practice a short meditation together. Or what happens to me in a long overdue hello or goodbye-for-a-long-time hug, if it is the lingering sort; a greater settling and sense of safety unfolds inside until a hidden door swings open in me, and I start to cry.

I've really missed you. We might have to hug for my body to tell me just how much.

complicated heroines

At 8:42 pm last night, I remembered that Beatrice had choir homework due by 9. I had been cleaning up the kitchen to a predictable Spotify-generated playlist of early nineties hip hop, singing and dancing for my dog, enjoying our solitude and trying not to wonder what my kids were doing upstairs. When the thing I had forgotten hit me, I predictably found Beatrice huddled up with an iPad, rushed her downstairs, and set her up with my laptop. Ah, pandemic life: one screen for another! And while she listened and sang, I sat next to her with last Sunday's Book Review. An essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld immediately caught my eye: Heroines of Self-Hate. 

She was talking about the protagonists of some of my very favorite novels from the past few years, that is to say, my widowhood. Of the books I read after Mike died, those that lingered longest were cited in her essay, including both Sally Rooney novels and Ottessa Moshfegh's My Year of Rest and Relaxation. I would add Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan to the list, and Fleabag, which isn't a book but is the best show I've ever seen and seems to speak to a similar experience. The women of these stories are whip smart, ambitious in varied ways, and alarmingly detached from their own feelings, unable to operate from an integrated place of core emotion. There is a sense of dangerous careening about in their interpersonal lives, though the narrative voice is often cool, deadpan. They seem completely unfazed by masculine cruelty and sometimes welcome it with unsettling detachment. Sometimes there is a flicker of the possibility of real connection in queer relationships, or more rarely, with vulnerable men. 

But most striking to me, beyond their protagonists' psychological bent, was the way these authors wrote subjective experience as fully embodied. The physical, sensory world seemed more present, more important in those books.

So it was interesting that Rosenfeld focuses on the way these fictional women hurt their own bodies without recognizing that their bodies are central to these books in a way that was more aligned with the stuff of real life - especially life in a particular kind of body that is subjected to scrutiny - than nearly any book I’d ever read before I stumbled upon this genre that is maybe capturing something new and complicated, something far more interesting than simply being about Young Women Who Hurt Themselves.

Have you ever read about what the pain of undiagnosed endometriosis is like? Frances in Conversations with Friends has shocking, inexplicable period pain; how she responds (and doesn't respond) to the pain is woven into her character. It's not the point of the story that she has an emergent chronic condition, but it's important to who she is. When does that ever happen? It's not a cough that leads to pneumonia and a death scene; rather it's a monthly experience of pain that informs how she experiences the world, and that she just lives with. That's it. Like life. Connell in Normal People similarly experiences depression in a physical and incapacitating way, on the floor. Sally Rooney describes the dull headache of fatigue, the cold stone beneath your thin pants on a damp day, the tenderness of a bruise. I was so close to my own experience of trauma and loss when I read her books, not far from the horror of entrenched insomnia and its associated headaches and upset stomach. The memory of being unable to eat, of barely feeling my own body, of moving through the world anyway, was close to me then.  

I encountered those characters as a reader, yes, but also as a woman, a widow, a mother, a therapist. The essayist, I suspect, didn't grow up in a world lit by social media, like the young people I spend my days listening to and the protagonists of these novels. They have always known surfaces take priority over actual flesh, alongside the quiet pressure to package and display oneself, market oneself in a marketplace of likes and followers that never goes dark. They inherited a world that denies the inevitability of pain and loss, the universality of fragility and finitude. Emotions are strangled and pushed and pinched, seen as interruptions and annoyances, even threats. Relentless misogyny sometimes goes underground but is no less trenchant. Young people have been taught to never stop; this is what they expect of themselves.

Is it so surprising then to encounter extraordinary young women who hurt themselves, or who seek out men to hurt them? Whether it's pharmaceutical-induced endless sleep, starvation or violence, a deep pain animates the gesture; unable to feel their own feelings that they must, at some level, desperately need to. So often the characters in these books have parents who have failed them, or worse, abused them; their communities and culture have fallen short too. It doesn't seem accidental that Connell is the one character who enjoys a secure attachment to his mother in Rooney's books; he had to know being loved to find his imperfect way to seeing and loving Marianne.

And Rosenfeld cites the mainstreaming of "therapy" (maybe those quotation marks are indicating the broader culture of wellness/self-care/therapy language) as something these young women have grown up with that marks their difference from previous generations of screwed up women. Yes, that psychiatrist in Rest and Relaxation was hilarious. Absurd! But those quotation marks definitely smelled snide to me. And geez, I don't know, maybe what I do all day serves a cog-in-the-machine purpose of helping people remain functional within an exploitive capitalist system whose very nature is dehumanizing. Whose very nature makes people sick inside. Maybe The Man fucking loves therapy. But I find it instead to be, at its best, inherently radical: the work I do with my clients hopefully leads to questioning those systems that have taught them they are no more valuable than their surfaces, skin, earning potential, brand. Unconditional embodied care and acceptance hopefully helps them know that they are always already incalculably valuable, simply because they are. 

Take that, you big dumb Man.

So anyway, yes, the human condition can be a real bitch, as Rosenfeld concedes, and these female characters enact the pressures and pains of our particular time: not being able to feel, longing for connection, inhabiting inchoate ambition and creativity. A reluctance and fear of stepping inside one's own life and filling the space, overflowing it. Living inside a body that hurts, gets hungry and tired and drunk and horny, bruises, bleeds - within a culture that denies imperfection and rejects bodies that do not adhere to an airbrushed problem-free pale form. An awareness of the crushing injustices we live inside of. A complicated relationship to power. And within all this, every time a character risks hope, vulnerability, connection, creation, valuing her own existence, love - even in small, mundane ways - it reads like a triumph. 

I loved reading these books because they were honest.

Now I'm about halfway through Deacon King Kong, by James McBride. You could say a lot of things about Sportcoat, the 70-something always-drunk deacon of Five Ends Baptist Church in the Cause projects, but he is a man that lives smack dab in the center of his own life. The other characters populating the Cause do, too. Their feelings and their bodies are their own, despite the forces aligned against them, giving shape to their experience. They know how to love one another. The contrast makes the lonely young white women of expansive Hong Kong and Dublin and New York seem all the more alien to themselves, strange silver fish in a very peculiar kind of tank, swimming along because despite it all, because of it all, it is simply good to be.

dear Michael

Mike. I woke up so early, like I have been every day over the past few weeks, as if my body has been preparing for this by recreating a whisper of the terrible fatigue of those days in the hospital three years ago with you. Between our old blue down comforter and Beatrice snuggled up asleep on my right, little lanky oven that she is, it was too hot. The weather has been changing. Last night I went to a tennis lesson at Buchanan Park in a t shirt. 

Tennis lesson? you say, with a little skeptical lift in your eyebrows. Yeah, for real. It's not pretty but it's fun, and I can tolerate how bad I am without crying (you of all people know that's no small thing), and my teacher is this Trumpy sociable older guy ...the whole thing is so improbable. I hadn't had a lesson since the fall, and I ran after work to the tennis courts, through crowds at the dog park and the playground and along all the paths, people who were joyfully emerging from their winter bodies and soaking in the sunshine together. I was one of them, grinning the whole time. You know how the sunshine and a chance to move can infect me with an irrepressible bounce. Well, it still does. Even on the eve of your day.

I had that thought out there: I am smiling, and tomorrow is your day. We call it Papa's Day. What it means to us is changing, just as our grief is changing. There is the work of time on us, of having accumulated so much life without you (that part is brutal, impossible). But then there is the fact of the children growing up. They think and feel and move and touch and listen differently now than they did then. They have grown in courage, in words, in capability, in soul. It's that sweetness of parenting that we got to experience together, the shared delight in witnessing a beloved person become more and more who they are. Their struggles, their triumphs, all of it, the acute moments of their becoming. The things they say. Always, Mike, it's the things they say. You understand. They are amazing.

I love them so much it hurts. It's a comfort that so many other people love them too, but Mike, only you love them like I love them. It's so hard to do this without you. It's hard to hold the ache of motherlove by myself. I don't have your clear eyes to search for across their heads so many times a day - or below their heads, as the case may be. You wouldn't believe how tall Gabriel is. What would that have been like, standing back to back and having to contend with the back of your boy's dark head triumphantly leaning against the top of your blonde one? 

When we went through the years of cancer-soaked crisis, and to be honest, for a long time before that, everything was about you and the children. Your illness was yours. You were the one who had to endure so much pain, unthinkable to me now. I was driving to the store after dropping Beatrice off at choir rehearsal the other night, thinking about an easy peasy semi-processed dinner option I might get, given how late it would be by the time we got home, and how happy food in packages makes our children. And that line of thinking suddenly got derailed by the memory of trying to find packaged microwavable foods that were transplant-friendly and calorie-rich, that you could both swallow and tolerate the taste of, and that we could keep in the mini fridge in your hospital room on the transplant floor. It took a lot of our collective brain power. Those awful little pasta containers with bright red plastic lids, the whole milk yogurt cups marketed to babies. I thought of that, and then I saw your pale arm resting on the chair in your hospital room, emerging from your thin white t shirt, a posture that spoke sadness. I saw just that, Mike. And I nearly broke at the wheel of the minivan at a stoplight on Lititz Pike. Sometimes the unbelievable cruel facts of what we went through hit me so hard. I wailed. I wailed for you, and for me.

That's a change. Only lately have I begun to know in my bones that it happened to me, too. I was not simply a vessel for your pain and the children's pain; I was not just a hand to hold or the caregiving I did my imperfect best to provide. People used to ask me then, how are you? and I honestly had no clue. Now sometimes I feel compelled to go back to those hard memories and touch them with my own hands, my own heart. How was I? Oh. I was hurting, so much. 

I remember telling you one morning in the sunny kitchen on Elm Street that we would be okay. You didn't have to worry about us. I could handle it. Ha! Like it was something I could add to the endless to do list: tackle a lifetime of widowhood and solo parenting. Without you. What the fuck did I know then? I could handle scheduling staging procedures in New York and Philadelphia hospitals, I could handle giving you those awful shots in your belly and operating the IV tubing after the transplant. Living through this grief, raising our children without you, this has been something else entirely, requiring every ounce of love and strength I have been lucky enough to soak up since I arrived on this earth.

My heart has stretched and broken and stretched and broken again. I didn't know anything could hurt this much. It was shocking, after you died. 

But also Mike, we are okay. It's weird. I'm becoming a really good therapist. I love my friends so much. Our dog Ramona is a source of pure delight and endless irritation. I started therapy over the summer and it's good. The kids are just amazing. They surprise me all the time.

I laugh my way through missed shots on the tennis court. I surprise myself too.

What I miss the most is your singular spirit and body. Your you-ness. What I would give to climb into bed next to you asleep on your side, to slide my cheek along the smooth space between your shoulder blades, and not say anything at all. 

Love,

Meagan