sing a song

A few nights ago I dreamt I was writing a song. In the morning I told Frances about it. She listened with an open, smiling expression, and when I was done asked, well, want to write a song with me?

Hmmm. Yes! I mean, I think so. Can I do that?

Her invitation was delivered with simplicity and an implicit faith that writing a song was something we could definitely do, no big deal, like taking a walk or making a phone call. Like making breakfast. She happens to write amazing songs so speaks with some authority about the apparent mundanity of all this. So the next morning when I woke up way too early, even though I don't know how to write a song, I tried out some lyrics at the kitchen table.

She found them later - you wrote a song! - and then asked if she could try setting it to music. Which she did, I kid you not, in about eight minutes. We sat down at the piano and identified the parts that sounded way too sentimental, the lines with too many syllables, figured out what was missing and what could use more rhyme. The back of my throat gathered tears throughout this easy collaboration with my musical daughter. I kept telling her how she was blowing me away. She kept laughing and telling me it was just basic music theory, nothing special.

Are you kidding me? I don't think so. She is a songwriting goddess. The way she can arrange chords and make simple words fill up with emotion and meaning they didn't have moments before, when they were sitting flat and pencilled on the page, strikes me as magical. 

We went through a few versions and finished it yesterday. We sang it together for my mom, Beatrice, Diana and Teb last night after dinner; I could barely hold off the tears. It's a song about turning forty-four next week, which is the same age as my dad. It's about having to grow up without him, and not wanting to leave the space his years made, and I sang it with my daughter who will someday turn forty-two and contend with being the same age as her dad. 

Later, Diana emailed me the poem she had recently written after her uncle died, about the experience of going to the site where his plane had crashed with family. It took me breath away. Reading it, I felt something of what it was like to be there, the quiet and light, the absence and presence.

And then this morning I received a letter from my friend Christine, inside of which was folded a poem she wrote that will be published next month. The poem is about learning that Mike died while she was at the beach. After dropping Beatrice at camp and Frances at work, I only had time to read the letter before going to a barre class. Afterwards, sweaty and content, I climbed back into my car and sat parked on Prince St with the windows down, the cool morning air and sounds of street life gently pushing against me as I unfolded her poem. 

You can read it in The Southern Review soon, if you're interested. It is very beautiful and like Diana's poem, took me right inside her experience: the water all around, the sun too bright, the shells on the beach.

I held that piece of white paper lightly in my fingers and a raucous brass band outside the Market nearby began to play. The joyful music fully cracked opened the pain of Christine's loss for me - her son's godfather died! - and it filled my whole body. Just for a moment, a gasp. Then I took a breath and nosed into the flow of traffic.

And all of these brushes over the past twenty-four hours with words and music that stretch towards what it is really like to live in the face of loss, mystery, and love have left me with a feeling of poignant tenderness that pulsates right at the surface, right where my skin and the air touch one another. The tenderness is for our particular stories, but even more than that I am moved by our human impulse to take pain and make it into something beautiful we can touch and give one another.

A song, a poem, a porcelain teacup, a photograph, a dance. Art can contain a crushing avalanche of hurt and transform it into glistening veined pebbles, the kind you can't bare to leave on the beach but take home and save in a glass jar instead. It can take the brute absurdity and outrage of death and transform it into an exquisite shape we can hold in our hands.

I love that. I love being a person and living in this world with other gorgeous maddening yearning people who make exquisite things out of what we are given. 

After we sang our song last night, Frances asked me if I wanted to write other songs (that is, after she trains me up so that I can actually sing the songs I write, which she insists is possible). 

I think they'll all be sad, I said. I can't really imagine writing any other kind of song.

That's okay, she said. Me neither. 

(The Frank O'Hara poem up top was on the wall of an exhibit at MOMA,where Frances and I visited last week for her 16th birthday).

the best day of my life

On Saturday night I sat down on the floor beneath Beatrice's loft bed (after a decent effort we concluded it was too scary up there for sleeping, so long ago we slid another mattress into the ingenious space-saving nook beneath and kicked the furniture back out into her crowded tiny bedroom). She beckoned me closer, to snuggle for her bedtime routine, so I stretched out long next to her and wrapped an arm around her tidy ribs. 

How old will I be when Didi goes to college?

I had to think. Hmmm...you'll be ten.

And what about Gabriel?

Then you'll be thirteen.

Silence. We lay entangled, our private thoughts about that eventuality unraveling within us.

It will be just us. 

I know.

I told her I've thought about that a lot. Will we be lonely for them? Will we love being a pair, or will we find it unsettling and fill the house with friends?

As we talked more about it, Beatrice became increasingly concerned about what it might be like for us to be alone, until suddenly she looked at me and said, but wait - I've been thinking about this as if I will be the same eight year old person when they go away! I'll be so much older, I'll probably feel differently about things then.

I agreed, and brought up all the teenagery things she sees her older siblings doing now that she will probably want to do then. It will feel really different, to be so much older. But that ushered in a whole new wave of discomfort. The shift was palpable. 

...But I don't want to be really different. I want to be me. 

Ah, but you will be! You'll be YOU, just older and wiser, more and more yourself. Beatrice, you're more you every day, all the time. It's so cool.

This brought some relief, and the freedom to pursue a series of math challenges and figure out how old everyone in our family will be when she is fifteen and eighteen and twenty-two. It felt exhilarating to both of us, imagining all the incredible futures ahead, all the things we have yet to experience, what it will be like to be a family of young adults, doing extraordinary things out in the world and loving each other through it all. 

But as the numbers got older (especially mine, in relation to theirs) I could feel a dark turn towards mortality waiting in the wings and so put an end to our endless bedtime routine, extracted myself from the pile of blankets and pillows on the floor, and said goodnight. 

Don't go!!

I'm going. Goodnight Beatrice. It's very late. 

Can I read?

Yes, but only for a few minutes.

I went upstairs to say goodnight to Gabriel, and almost cried as I shut his door in parting, imagining him as a twenty year old (which is how old he'll be when Beatrice is fifteen, as we had just discovered). 

I went down to the kitchen to give the animals their last bit of care for the day and lock the doors and turn out the lights. I remembered how Beatrice said earlier: I love today! I think this is one of the best days of my life. Nothing particularly amazing had happened. The older kids had had their second vaccine shots the day before and were feeling low energy, thus we scrapped some other plans. They were off the hook for chores and we watched Sing Street together in the middle of the day. I blasted The Cure afterwards, and made a plan for us to go to the beach in July. Beatrice and I went to our friends' house for a little garden party and she practiced her cartwheels on the pristine lawn. I grilled hamburgers for dinner. I always feel like a badass widow when I use our grill. We ate on the front porch and watched people with their dogs wandering by in the lavish evening humidity. 

It was a beautifully uneventful, unbusy Saturday, and we spent it together. It was one of the best days of Beatrice's life.

No wonder she worries about the changes ahead. I do too. 

The thing is, I notice myself oriented towards the unknowable future often and casually considering the present to be transitional, in-between, on-the-way-towards. On the way towards what exactly, I'm not sure. A time when I'm a better therapist, more knowledgable and authoritative? Maybe a time when our house is as it should be instead of in-process, when the walls are all painted and the washing machine doesn't leak. When my body has achieved optimum fitness and strength, when my hair color is just right, when my dog  has developed some modicum of impulse control and doesn't bark at the neighbors. When I write that book already. And when I have fallen in love again with a beautiful wise and funny man with whom I will want to share all this poignant, abundant, messy life.

Because then this scrambling grieving widow interlude will end, and prove to have been the creme center of an Oreo, sandwiched between chocolatey parts one and two.  

The only problem with being in-between the times when my real life happens is that it makes zero sense. How could I think my life isn't already real, here and now, all the time? If I believe myself to be treading water, waiting for something new, something better, to happen, I will entirely miss the fact that I am a fucking ace swimmer, and that I've been kicking out towards the vast horizon for a long time now. 

Sometimes I practice this little Tara Brach thing to help me remember. I recommend it. Basically, whatever is happening, you respond with yes. I tried it last night while I was squinting in the sun, waiting for an outdoor choral concert to which I had brought Beatrice and our friend Annika early, in preparation for their performance. Yes. I'm hot, it will be another hour til the concert, I don't know a soul here, I'm irritable, yes. Those yeses encouraged me to wander around until I found a sweet library porch with comfortable chairs where I could read. Yes to my novel, yes to words. Yes to the sadness that overwhelmed me while I was listening to their beautiful music and Mike's absence squeezed my heart. (That yes invited tears that had been patiently waiting to come out). Yes to the sweaty summer crowd of families all around me, still a novelty. (That yes brought a smile). Yes to cicadas falling from the sky. (That yes, a laugh, tickled by their absurdity). Yes to not being able to find the car afterwards. Yes, definitely yes, to an ice cream stop on the way home, yes to licking towering cones of soft serve and sitting at a shabby picnic table at a country intersection, billboards and a shadowy crane dark against the sky that glowed its last gasp in brilliant pinks and oranges before the darkness fell, and it was finally time to go home.

I love walking to school with Beatrice. We have one more morning to go before second grade is over. Last week, we were playing a game on our way, and she dared me to tango across an intersection with her. Well, that yes was an easy one. Yes to tango. Yes to silly. A couple of days later, a woman waved us down near the school. 

I saw you two tangoing across the street the other day. I was waiting at the red light and you danced in front of me!

Beatrice started to turn red and covered her face. She peered at me between her fingers and whispered I'm so embarrassed.

I smiled at her. I smiled at the woman. Yeah, I admitted. That was us. 

You guys made me happy all day long. I just wanted to thank you. It was awesome.

That was it. She waved, we waved. That was my life happening, right here and now. 

I got distracted with something and forgot to tell Beatrice to turn out the lights on Saturday, after our long talk about growing older together. I ran back up the stairs and saw her light on and groaned. It was after 11. I'm so bad at facilitating healthy sleep for that girl.

I called out, Beatrice! Lights out!

She didn't respond, so I went in and found her sound asleep on her back, a book tucked under one arm, her face turned away from me, beautifully lit in profile by the warm glow of her reading light. She was wearing one of my shirts. 

Beatrice won't be eight forever. We know, we've done the math. But she is eight today! To which I say yes. 

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.