breathless

I dreamt last night that I was washing dishes alone in the kitchen. It was a mix of kitchens: the old Annapolis kitchen (our house is now on the market), my mother's kitchen, our current kitchen on Elm Street. All was quiet. Suddenly a healthy Mike came rushing in, moving with his old tightly-wound, quick physicality.

I had to take you to the hospital.

My hands were still in the soapy sink. You did?

I took you to the hospital Meagan, and you died. 

I was standing there, rooted, so worried about Mike. He was agitated and distraught, pacing while reporting this terrible thing that had happened. I wanted to reach out and comfort him. I wanted to hold him and tell him it was okay, just back up, slow down, explain what exactly happened to me at the hospital, I'm sure we can face this together. But I knew he was too upset for a hug; he had to keep moving. I just stood there looking at him with my wet hands hanging in the air, and he looked back at me, bewildered and searching. He seemed to be saying, how could you have just died like that?

That's all I remember from the dream. I woke up still inside of it, and it took me awhile to realize that no, I had taken Mike to the hospital. He was the one who had died.

The middle finger and thumb of my right hand reach many times a day for the place on my left hand where my wedding ring should be. I realize I'm looking for the ring when I notice my middle finger sliding back and forth along the bone, pushing against its firmness. Especially after we picked out a circle of tiny diamonds for our fifteenth wedding anniversary last year, which I wore settled closely on top of my wedding ring, I developed a habit of tugging the rings back and forth against each other. It was a comfort.

I asked Mike for those diamonds. He had to be convinced, though in the end he wondered if he shouldn't have advocated harder for a big rock, rather than agreeing to the more modest circlet I chose. A small, quiet part of me knew then that I needed something I would be allowed to wear after Mike died. It's on my right hand now. It scrapes without the heft of the wedding ring next to it, which surpassed its rough edges and clanked gently against the floor when I would settle, palms up, for savasana in yoga class. I don't slide it around now; I keep fingering the space where it should be instead.

Grasping the bone where my ring should be, my sleeping mind twisting reality in my dreams - every part of me searches for Mike. My waking mind cycles through memories: the intesity and fear and togetherness of the last days in the hospital, the quiet moments upstairs in our bedroom, hooking up his IV meds before I made dinner, kneeling on the ground at his feet while he sat in the orange chair, not saying anything at all and feeling so tenderly, listening to the kids downstairs. And my mind surprises me by offering up, amidst all the memories of our scary years with lymphoma, brilliant scenes from our past, especially our first weeks together.

I was sitting on the lawn at Swarthmore with Heather in the bright sunshine on one of the very first warm spring days. Mike was visiting that weekend; he had stopped in the library for something while we chatted at a distance outside. I was leaning back on my hands with my legs stretched out in front of me, newly bare and sensitive to the prickly green grass. Suddenly I looked up and saw Mike coming towards us. He was walking quickly, and when our eyes met he smiled and began to jog, with his elbows held close to his sides, hands high, and his thumbs jaunty and upright. He often ran like that: thumbs up. Two thumbs up. It was a little eccentricity, a way he moved that I always noticed and loved. Even at his most serious, his most existential and focused, this one part of him was resolutely sunny, gesturing to all who cared to look: everything's a-okay.

He was wearing a little white t-shirt, as he often did in those days. His summertime uniform. He and his tightly-wound temperament were relaxed and happy, which gave him a beautiful youthful bounce. He held my eyes, lightly jogging the entire way across that vast lawn, and the more I looked at him the more passionate unhinged love welled up in me, so big that I could barely stand to hold his gaze. I smiled crazily back at him until it all came out in a big laugh. Here he comes, this handsome golden bouncing boy, right to me! Heather groaned a bit. You guys.

I hold that vision of Mike on the lawn close. It reminds me of Gilead, when John Ames wonders what it will be like to inhabit a resurrected body. What age will he be when he rises again? He imagines himself as a young man, throwing and catching a baseball, feeling ease and grace and lightness in his limbs.

During those early days while I was still in school I wrote Mike an email with the subject 'breathless in beardsley.' Beardsley was the computer lab. We wrote each other often. (Where are those emails now? In an immaterial jumble, mixed up with all the other lost love letters that are drifting through cyberspace, I suppose.) I described for him how desperately I missed him, how I had sat down in the lab intending to write him a quick note and the anticipation of reaching out to him in that way had quickly mounted and left me feeling absolutely breathless. As if I were sipping air through a straw. I was dizzy and lightheaded and could barely breathe, I missed him so much. What was I doing in this dreary, fluroescent-lit computer lab without him?

I only remember it because Mike later mentioned how I had captured the moment just perfectly, how evocative that email was. He didn't articulate admiration often or give compliments easily. As Frances says, that's why you believed it when he told you something good about yourself. Nearly all of Mike's words of praise for me are seared in my mind. In the past it almost embarrassed me, how jealously I treasured them.

Maybe I keep remembering that time of ardent, impassioned love, that time of seeing only Mike - jogging across the lawn, walking down a Brooklyn street, sitting in a friend's living room, when barely anything else in my field of vision registered, because this time of piercing loss is like a matching bookend to our time on earth together. The end is like the beginning. I see Mike all the time now too. I look for him everywhere. All things point to him, relate to him, reveal him.

I am breathless again. When you're grieving, it's easy to forget to breathe.

Last weekend we went to the cemetery with friends who were visiting. It was overcast and the temperature seemed to be dropping by the minute; the quality of the air moving against us felt ominous. But the rain was holding off. Beatrice and her new friend Aydin were wandering, picking wild strawberries to put on Mike's grave, which is still covered in clumps of dirt. Frances sat on one side, and I sat on the other.

Whenever we first arrive at the cemetery, getting out of the car and walking up the grassy hill, I feel the loss of Mike so deeply - the strangeness and weight of it, the impossibility of it - that I fear my knees will buckle. I have to focus on putting one foot in front of the other. I have to remind myself to breathe. Eventually I settle in to the sadness and it's okay. There's always some crying. Sometimes the kids cry with me, sometimes they are simply quiet.

But on Sunday I hadn't felt the internal downshifting into sorrow, the settled sadness. I was still in the pain and shock stage. I gathered my knees tightly to my chest there on the ground and held myself together so I wouldn't break apart. I was aware of the children, of our friends, of the wind blowing against my face. I knew I was crying; I tried to keep it quiet. I closed my eyes, unable to be present to everyone else, and heard my mind pleading: Do you have him, God? Please say you have him.

I meant have him in the sense I would have used it at a party, or the pool, or after school, when it was almost time to leave and I needed to gather up our family: Mike, do you have Beatrice? Is she safe and secure with you? Are you keeping an eye on her? Can you assure me that she's okay, you won't let her go?

And just as this desperate prayer formed itself, I felt something cold and sharp suddenly hit my right knee, and then my left. I opened my eyes, startled. Was I crying cold tears? No - no. It was rain. But something about my own crying and praying and pain told me that God was crying too.

Maybe God was telling me he does indeed have Mike. Or maybe God was simply crying with me, sharing my sorrow. At the time the latter possibility seemed more salient. I didn't think about what happened next to Lazarus; I just held in my heart how Jesus wept.

A few moments later, Frances spotted an Eastern bluebird settling down near a grave a few yards away from us. An Eastern bluebird! That shook me free. I skirted around Mike's grave and sat with her. She pointed out others in the big tree towering above us. We never see Eastern bluebirds. A picture of one started Frances's birding obsession at the tender age of four. They were - and are - her very favorite bird. I made a cake in the shape of a bluebird for her sixth birthday. She taught us to see songbirds through her eyes then, and all of us gratefully adopted her sense of wonder and curiousity and admiration, though none of us ever matched her ability to identify them and their calls. Mike delighted in all of it.

If he were to send Frances a sign - a sign of hope and continuity and love - it might be an Eastern bluebird. We couldn't believe it. There was a family of them, taking shelter before the storm, right there next to Mike's grave.

Every time we go to the cemetery, we are devastated anew and we are nurtured afresh. Tears and bluebirds. I miss you, Mike.

birthday

I'm a perpetually five-minutes-late kind of person. It's because I'm not good with transitions. Also, I have a compulsion to squeeze in one more thing before it's time to leave. I don't start putting Beatrice's shoes on until the minute we're supposed to be walking out the door. Ask my kids; it drives them crazy. We're almost on time guys, I say. Give me a break.

Twenty years ago today though, I arrived at Mike's family home seriously late - like two hours late - having gotten turned around on the way there after finishing my last final of my senior year of college. My car held neither GPS nor cell phone, nor yellowing misfolded map showing the details of the Wilmington suburbs, and when I discovered that 95 South was closed due to some emergent terrible accident I had absolutely no idea how to get to the Brogan's house. I pulled over at a gas station to ask for directions, got confused, pulled over again and asked for more directions, then eventually called from a pay phone. I was meeting Mike's family for the first time, and celebrating his birthday for the first time, too. Arriving hours late, flustered and hot with all my worldly limitations on display, felt terribly inauspicious.

What was it like? Well. It was 1998. For some reason I rememer that I was wearing a very baggy pair of cargo pants and a strappy red tank top. Is it possible I wore no bra? No bra at all? I was twenty and clueless and apparently did not think the as-yet-unknown sisters and mother of my new boyfriend would judge me or my weird floppy boobs. Maybe the world was a kinder place then.

The guest list indeed included Mike's parents and sisters, and I'm pretty sure his grandmother was there too. Ryan and Trevor, friends from Swarthmore, were also in town, hanging out in the backyard when I arrived. I didn't know Ryan well then (he gave one of Mike's eulogies) but I did know Trevor, and I remember him giving me a bemused, questioning look in greeting, eyebrows arched just so, that seemed to say: however is it that you find yourself here in Mike Brogan's suburban backyard surrounded by this lush green lawn and his many lovely family members, in the midst of an intimate birthday celebration? Meagan Howell, are you sure Mike Brogan is your boyfriend?

Because I still felt somewhat amazed that someone as handsome and brilliant and outrageously fucking cool as Mike Brogan was in love with me. An interloper. Maybe Trevor's look really just meant: fashionably late, are we? I've been waiting to play awkward frisbee with you for hours. But at the time I figured he was probably skeptical about the whole arrangement.

Mike greeted me with so much concern and understanding (I hadn't yet grasped how shockingly poor his own sense of direction was) and I desperately wanted to escape into an upstairs room with him. I had gotten into my dad's old Nissan Altima that morning feeling confident, elated to be finished with college and heading off on a sunny spring day to see Mike and meet his parents, who would surely love me too, but by the time I arrived I was sweaty, red-cheeked, and unexpectedly shy.

I didn't know how to act with Mike's family. Was I too weird? Uncouth? In those days Mike used to tease me by saying I was raised in a barn. (Because who wears a bra in a barn?) Would my patent barny-ness betray me? The whole birthday scene made me uneasy. I was (and still am) afraid of what Mike always called "lawn sports" and his backyard seemed to be the kind of setting in which one would be expected to play them. Casually. For fun. (Maybe everyone calls activities such as frisbee and softball and badminton that typically unfold at picnics lawn sports. Maybe I have assiduously avoided lawn sports my whole life and Mike, being my husband, was the only person intimate enough to facilitate the very few moments I was forced to participate in them and thus name them for me.) I'm miserable with flying objects.

But he loved them. He loved having a catch on a manicured lawn (despite later becoming a passionate grower of native plants and vegetables and wildflowers, and frequently bemoaning the monocultural evils of suburban lawns, he still loved them). He loved eating orange goldfish crackers by the handful, alongside a peanut butter sandwich. He loved talking Philly sports teams with his dad. He loved chocolate cake. He loved his birthday.

I saw these qualities for the first time, windows into Mike's childhood, on full, comfortable display that May 23rd in Delaware. My urban sophisticated philosopher was also a boyish suburban sports fan. I was fascinated. Also a little scared. I didn't know this world that he was from. I did just fine in his Brooklyn apartment, but could I fit into this place too?

That uneasiness I felt, alongside so many other emotions, is why I particularly remember Mike's mom Barbara drawing me aside at one point during the afternoon. She must of picked up on my self-consciousness. (An aside: I am SO GLAD to be done with the lingering insecurities of my twenties. Aren't you?) She told me that she'd been watching us talk together on the grass from her bedroom window, and she felt that anyone who elicited such tenderness and gentleness in her son was someone she knew she would love too. She said she'd never seen him behave quite that way with anyone, that it was a joy for her to see us together.

That was a gift. Exhale, Meagan. It's going to be okay.

Today Mike should be forty-three. He should be here with us, sharing the strawberry cake and whipped cream we made for him and took to the cemetery after school. We baked for him every year, even when he was sick, even when we knew it would be hard for him to swallow.

Because for Mike, birthday cake mattered. Celebrations mattered.

How could we not make him a cake today? I've been crying all day. My friends and family keep bringing me flowers and sending messages and offering hugs and I just keep crying.

I was hugging Frances in bed the other night, both of us so sad. I was looking out across the shadowy room, hearing the other children sleep, thinking this is so hard, so bleak, harder than anything in the world. And then I immediately thought how Mike can't have this pain with me. He can't hold our children in the night.

I was overwhelmed with anguish for him, my husband who had to contend with the loss of them, who knew he wouldn't be able to comfort them in their grief, or watch them grow. Our experiences throughout his illness were necessarily and frustratingly different; I was working harder than I can now imagine taking care of him and the children and everything else, while he was often suffering in body and spirit in a quiet room, reading the lives of the saints, wrestling with questions of faith and love and death, mourning the future he did not have. I couldn't contain all that then. I was already saturated. Now part of my sorrow is looking back and recognizing the pain of his grief. I can barely stand it.

I pray every morning and every night that God indeed had something extraordinary in store for Mike that none of us can possibly understand from where we are now. I pray God's grace that descended upon Mike in the moments leading to his death will touch me in some small way, and strengthen my own faith. Because that was how Mike could stand the pain of loss; he trusted God.

He often said he hoped in heaven he could sing. Brilliantly, purely, one voice in a beautiful heavenly choir. Mike, on your birthday, I hope you and all the angels and saints are making holy music together. I hope being with God is more than just a consolation for not being here with us on earth. I hope it is the fulfillment of a lifetime of yearning.

Even so. Even if it is. I miss you with an ache that never stops.

things we're all too young to know

Lately I’ve felt annoyed with Beatrice. This isn't exactly remarkable, I know, because kids are annoying. But Beatrice has many social gifts, and she plays some important roles in our family, and even though she is five years old, Mama-Annoyer normally isn’t one of them. She definitely grates on her siblings at times with her carelessness and quick tears. She has a willfulness that shines hard and bright when it is time to get dressed; the logic of her fashion sensibility is discernible only to her and her adherence to it is completely unbending. She is fixated on sweets in a way that can come off as borderline pathological. She would like to get her way 100% of the time and protests when she doesn’t by draping herself over a chair and whining.

But all of these things seem par for the preschool course, and like I said, her social gifts are such that mini-conflicts that arise around them are typically quickly resolved. For example: when I collapse on her floor, belly up, cushioned by the mat of interlocking brightly colored alphabet letters that I have tried in vain to remove and replace with a more tasteful rug, staring up at the ceiling and groaning about her INSANE INSISTENCE on the SAME DIRTY PAIR OF LEGGINGS with a HOLE in the KNEE, LORD, Beatrice, WHY oh WHY do we do this every morning? We HAVE to find a better way to get dressed!!! Or, more recently, It is 90 DEGREES OUT TODAY and you want to wear a SWEATER and you HATE being hot and when I pick you up you will complain and look at me like it’s MY fault that your cheeks are SO HOT and your head is SO SWEATY but YOU ARE THE ONE WHO WANTS TO DRESS FOR JANUARY IN MAY. 

And while I rant she stands over me in her mint green underwear with pink edging, the cotton little girl kind with a waistband that hits around her belly button and fits like a sweet 1950s bathing suit bottom, a baby Marilyn Monroe with a slight slouch, her shoulder blades poking out like wings behind her and her hair a tangle, flashing her blue eyes sympathetically down at her wreck of a mother on the floor. 

Mama, I know. I hate getting dressed too. It’s okay that they’re dirty. Just let me wear the pants.

Beatrice can be very persuasive, and in these moments she looks and behaves eminently more reasonable that I do. I just have to smile. Or not - sometimes I’m past the point of regaining my balance and continue my lunatic mother routine and say FINE FINE, WEAR THE PANTS and inside-out them and help shove her long feet into each leg, making a mental note of the dirty ragged toenails, tonight I must cut them tonight and also when did she last have a bath? and also is it so bad to have infrequent baths? and then I’m brushing her teeth and she’s dancing in a goofball way while I do and making me smile and making herself laugh with toothpaste foam leaking out the sides of her mouth and by then I’ve already forgotten the moment of unhinged irritation on the floor five minutes ago.

But lately, I have a hard time shaking it off. And she has a hard time refraining from whining. 

I listened to Annette Benning on Fresh Air the other day. She was talking about a clip Terry played from a movie in which she played a single mom raising her teenage son. After he makes a scary mistake, her character grills him, asking him why he did something so dumb. The son turns it back on her, saying well, why are you smoking yourself to death? Why don’t you care that you’re sad and lonely?

She replies something to the effect of you’re not allowed to say that to me.

In the interview Annette Benning laughed and said, that was the best the character could do in that moment. That was simply all she had. Just a tiny shred more than nothing. She was basically parenting on empty.

And that’s how I feel with Bea sometimes. She’ll respond to a request or refusal from me with the beginning of a tantrum or a whine, or some piece of typical illogical pissed off five year old truth, and I’ll just stare back at her blankly.

What do I do now again? What am I supposed to say? Could someone please hand me the script? I seem to have forgotten my lines.

Or worse, I’ll say something that I know is useless. Such as Beatrice, if you can’t stop that right now you’ll have to have a time out upstairs!

Then she stares back at me momentarily, dumbfounded, before the hysterics ramp up even more.

Whoops. Wrong line. 

I’m parenting on empty. I’m texting and emailing and chatting with other parents at drop off and with the grocery store checker and the woman from PPL and the bank teller on empty. I forget my lines all the time. Or I have to think really hard to remember what they are.

How am I…? What does one say in response to that again? Terrible, sad, tired, disoriented, distractible? No, no, no. 

It’s fine. You say I’m fine, thanks. How are you? 

Part of why Beatrice has been hard is that she is the child most attached to me, most dependent on my emotional state to stabilize her own. We’re really in this together. It’s that old tiresome thing - when things in your life are really hard, and you need your kids to step up and just be good please, they fall apart. Your stress eats away at their own sense of balance, but they can't tell you that. Instead they miss the toilet, or cry wildly because they can't have a toy in line at the store, or refuse to put on their shoes, or pick a fight with you about your appalling arrival time at school.

Two nights ago, I was with Beatrice on the floor of my bedroom for her bedtime routine. She's taken to leaping from my bed onto her mattress which is situated on the floor below, then clambering up the side of my bed and doing it again, and again, while I sing songs and say prayers.

This bothers me. It can't possibly prepare a child for restful sleep. When it's time to count to ten in French while stroking her forehead (don't ask how this step in the routine developed) and adminstering three "sprinkle dusties" I insist she get under the covers. I say things like it's time to relax your body, and she says things like well I can't.

Fair enough. We do our best. Then I stay with her for a few moments. This started immediately after Mike died, when she felt afraid to fall asleep. I would sit with her, holding her hands and murmuring various mantras of my own devising about being safe and loved until she fell asleep. Now this time in our routine has no soporific effect at all; Beatrice just braces herself throughout the quiet moments for when I will get up to leave, at which point she clings to me and begs for another hug.

So. This night I got onto her toddler-sized mattress and wrapped my arms around her and waited to relax, and let go of the irritation, which indeed thankfully happened. I felt her body relax too. I felt quiet and sleepy and so in rushed thoughts of my husband. Mike, Mike, this girl of ours! Mike, how will we get through this without you? Mike, I'm worried I'm messing them up. Oh Mike. 

Suddenly Beatrice pulled her head back and looked at me, hard. 

Mama. You're going to start crying.

I guess I am. How did you know?

You started breathing like this - and she demonstrated a pattern of inhales and breath holding. 

The girl knows before I do.

I guess you're right, Bea. I was about to cry. I'm just thinking about your Papa.

I know.

*          *          *          *          *

About a year ago someone stole the antenna off our car. For some reason I feel incapable of doing anything about it. The radio comes in very crackly and is often impossible to listen to. Normally when I drive I turn to the soothing sounds of NPR, and that habit is so deep that I have learned to tolerate quite a bit of crackle in order to maintain it. So much crackle that if you asked me, at times I couldn't even tell you what show I was listening to. I just keep hoping the reception will miraculously improve.

But when I was in Annapolis cleaning out our house, I found a big box of CDs and pulled a few out to take home with me. One was the 69 Love Songs box set, and I loaded all three into the car stereo. So now instead of crackle I listen to Stephen Merritt sing love songs in the car. 

And all of them - at least the ones he sings - are for me. And Mike. In the spirit of:

I should have forgotten you long ago
but you're in every song I know

It could be a memory of hearing the song with Mike, or the sentiment, or the humor. It feels like Mr. Merritt is in the car with me, offering various stylized ways to express my sorrow in his marvelous bass voice.

Why would I stop loving you 

a hundred years from now?

It's only time. 

Marry me. 

It made me think about the night Mike and I were lying in bed, talking about the possibility of my remarrying. I don't want to, I said, because I already have a husband. And Mike said but when I die, you won't anymore.

It was utterly shocking. Why would his death alter the fact that he's my husband? But then we both remembered the words we said to each other. Until we are parted by death. When one of you dies, the marriage ends. How bizarre. How impossible.

So I drive around and cry. I remember a Magentic Fields show in New York in summer with Mike. I ordered a bloody mary and the bartender made a joke about it not being breakfast time. I asked him to please make it spicy and told him he should try one right now, at night, because it was delicious. We heard Stephen Merritt sing Book of Love accapella, and the room felt very still and dark, and I leaned lightly against Mike's shoulder and chest just behind me, and could feel he was less moved than I. No matter; it felt good to be in that time and place together.  

My minivan failed inspection this morning. I'd like to ignore the busted rear brake pads. I'd like to drive around in a failed car, parenting on empty, crying, listening to Papa was a Rodeo over and over with the kittens mewing along in the backseat and the children begging me to turn this weird music off already while we head off into the blazing sunset.

Well. I'll probably fix the brake pads. But the rest will happen this summer. By August they might be singing along. 

outside in it

When a shirt or pair of pants intended for wear is stubbornly "inside-outted," my children will bring it to me, asking if I would please outside in it for them. I've outside-inned more items than I could count over the past twelve years. Frances must have coined the phrase as a toddler, then Gabriel picked it up, and now Beatrice uses it exclusively, as the other children do their own outside-inning these days.

I've looked, and there are precious fews pictures of me and Mike together. Most of the time one of us was the photographer, and Mike wasn't big on the selfie. So there you have it. Not a lot of outside-in views. I took the above picture last winter. It was a relatively better time health-wise, and Mike had promised the kids he could make it to the sledding hill. But once we got there, the wind was terrible, and he was just so sensitive to the cold. He didn't feel well; we both knew it was a bad idea. So we documented our arrival on that freezing hill as proof - you see, Papa did come! - and then Mike quickly went home to warm up under the covers.

I've always held that being on the inside of a relationship can be ulimately lonely, because no one besides the two of you can really know what it is. If you and your partner are alienated from one another, it can seem that there is no one in the whole world with whom you can connect about your struggles. No one can really understand; no one but him.

I rarely talked about Mike. He was a private person; it seemed a distasteful betrayal to talk about him, good or bad, in his absence. Besides, it didn't appeal because it would be utterly futile. How could I communicate one piece of what we are, who we are, and expect anyone else to really get it, without access to the entirety of the thing? Any effort to explain or share about him, and me, and us, seemed pointless.

There are a tiny handful of friends who love and know us both well with whom, during Mike's years of illness, I would sometimes talk. They are people who supported us both unconditionally, knew our flaws, and could empathize with me without making an object of Mike. So that felt safe. I needed to push at those privacy boundaries sometimes; Mike simply wasn't able to talk through things with me in the same way and we were beset by the hardship imposed on us by his rare illness. But even in those moments, I worried. I might vent in the midst of sadness and anger, but my friend won't know about the goodness that followed. She will carry around the wrong idea. She will think our lives are always that messed up. Ugh.

It's as if I thought we were in a spaceship. And that every couple is in their own unknowable spaceship. And we fly around together and notice each other, comment on shine and shape and speed, and sometimes one member of the crew will step out and complain about the other's predilection for dim interior lighting whereas she prefers it bright, but you can never have a clue about the truly important stuff that goes on in there.

But something interesting has happened since Mike died. People send me cards, and sometimes they share memories. They share their impressions formed outside the ship. Much of the comments about Mike are comforting to read, and consistent with what we all knew about him: his kindness, his humor, his sensitivity and intelligence. How he was "staggeringly handsome," a phrase that someone from Swarthmore who knew Mike and lived in the same dorm during their freshman year used to describe him in a card she wrote me and that I continue to treasure. Exactly. Simply beautiful, up until the moment he died, with his clear eyes and delicate, perfect cheekbones and jaw, his boyish face. When he taught at St. John's, he was often mistaken for a student. Sometimes I found that irritating (why do you get to be so damn youthful and good-looking, while the man at the wine store takes one look at the dark circles beneath my eyes and knows I'm buying this wine to console myself with after the children are in bed?) but mostly I felt proud of my staggeringly handsome husband.

Sometimes, more rarely, people share memories of us. And this is a very great and nearly always surprising gift to me. A friend remembers seeing us walk hand in hand on Main Street in Annapolis. (Us? Hand in hand? Mike, who was so boundaried physically and rarely showed affection in public?). She said she was shocked when I once shared with her that we were fighting because we just didn't seem like the kind of couple who fought. Another remembers how delighted I was to see him when I walked in a room and found him there, how I lit up in smiles, how visible was our love for each other, just in the way we looked at one another. Another wrote about how everyone could see how deeply Mike loved me.

Really? He did? You could? Are you guys just saying all this to comfort a devastated widow? Could it really be true? Could you see us - and could you see things about us that we were too mired in everyday life to notice ourselves? Life is so full, sometimes overwhelmingly so. In our old pre-cancer  Annapolis lives we had little ones and school and work and always so much to do: water in the basement, visitors coming next weekend, a babysitter who just backed out, laundry piled on the couch. It was all trees most of the time. Did other people who stood beyond the treeline see a more beautiful and majestic forest?

I wrote earlier how I had to realize that I wasn't trusting Mike enough to tell him when I was hurt or upset; I wasn't trusting him to love me no matter what. I think I often struggled with that; with not trusting his love for me. His own challenges, before and during his illness, sometimes made it hard for him to express it. But I learned, and know now, that it was always strong and true. Still. It's an old habit, a part of me that doesn't quite know how to release it's hold on that scratching doubt. So when people tell me something I already know - that Mike loved me, that they could see it, that it was real - that fearful doubting part of me sighs and sags in relief, saying, oh thank you, thank you, thank you. Say it again. Let it be true.

My mind goes back to the hours before and moments during Mike's death all the time. Every day, many times a day. When we knew he was dying, that there was no way around the fact that soon he would not be able to breath, he looked at me. A moment. His eyes, so very beautiful, so very him. He gave me a little wave that felt unbearable - that was how he acknowledged that we both knew this was our goodbye. He typed on the iPad: you know how much I love you.

He knew about that small sad part of me and he knew it was getting tinier with each passing moment. I told him I did. And that he knew how much I loved him. It was the truth.

But how extraordinary, that I keep on learning about us, in this time of sorrow and weight. I like to hear about us from the outside in. It affirms all the yearnings of my heart. Let it be truer and truer still.

I persist in tree mode with Mike. Each significant moment - Frances's choir concert, the arrival of our two new kittens, a terrible conflict with one of the kids - is an opportunity to miss him afresh. To feel the strangeness of his absence, and to anticipate his response to the situation. And the thing is, a good sandwich is a significant moment. So is a beautiful flowering tree, or learning last night that our old Annapolis contractor is caring for his wife who has a rare brain cancer, or going to the New School art show and watching various kids we know perform, or finding ants in the kitchen. Again. Oh Mike, can you believe these stupid ants?

If you pay attention, what moment in your day isn't significant? And so he is with me, and not with me, all the time. It's sadder than I can properly say.

It's also disorienting. Sometimes I feel that I don't even know what I like, or what I do, or what I think, without him to hold onto or push back against. The kittens? I know I wanted them. Mike would say I have enough on my plate right now, feel a little protective of me in this state, suggest I slow things down, not take on new responsibilities quite yet. I'd say well, they are a lot of work, but we are so sad and they bring us joy. And then he'd say, okay Meagan. And give me a hug, still thinking it was a little crazy. And be sad with me.

I'm the one who overextends; he's the one who withdraws. I'm the one who loves to cook and eat; he's the one who's more ascetic. I'm sloppy, he's neat. I have the worst sense of time, he arrives three minutes early. What to do when you no longer have your one to understand yourself in relationship to? Am I actually the way we thought I was? Can I keep our family intact without Mike's complementary and balancing influence? Even when he was so sick and I was doing everything, which was for quite a long time, I still could hear him upstairs in bed thinking it was past Bea's bedtime, and that helped me to get a move on. Now he's not there quietly noticing - or not noticing - my lax parenting on display and I can't get anyone to go to bed. In fact everyone is sleeping in my room and chronically tired. Our room. Mike was so good at bedtime routines and consistency, at keeping the kids in their own beds! I used to boast that was the only thing we were really great at as parents. But now I know Mike was great at it, not me. I just followed his lead.

When you tell me what we were like, and what I was like, and what our family is like, it's a sturdy handhold for me. Even if it's about the past, the distant past - like Mike being a staggeringly handsome eighteen year old. It validates and secures my slippery reality. It helps me understand where I came from, which surely must help me tolerate the uncertainty of my path going forward.

We do love each other? We did endure with faithfulness and love through a terrible time? Our kids are alright? They won't resent me indefinitely? They do know how Mike treasured them? We did take good care of him?

Our marriage was real and true and loving and good? I loved him well?


Oh, my friends. Keep outside inning this, please.