all the tender places

I wonder how many times over the past three years I hollered up the stairs or rapidly texted the words: I'm coming! Mike, I'm coming, just wait a minute, I'll be there. When he couldn't speak, he rang a bell upstairs. Or texted me. And I'd be washing dishing and talking to one of the kids, and not see his message for ten minutes, and feel awful when I finally looked and saw three terse texts in a row. Are you there, Meagan? I'd run up the stairs, hands dripping, chest tight, to see what was wrong.

When he was in the hospital, and it was time for me to pick up the kids or head back to work, I'd always tell him when I'd be back. And I always seemed to be running late, both to the thing I had to leave him for, and on the way back to him. I'd scramble into the car and quickly text him: I'm coming, I'm heading to the hospital now, I'll be there very soon.

Often I felt pulled to shreds. There was always a child who needed help or attention, and a dinner that needed making, and a job to show up for, and always, always Mike, especially over the last few months - spiking another fever, manifesting symptoms that I needed to call the on-call physician about, needing me to bring him water or set up his IV meds. I hated that I was always coming and so rarely simply there when the need arose.

When my clockwork tears started up at the end of savasana this past Friday, I succumbed and let my mind go to all the tender places it wanted to: the warm, smooth space between Mike's shoulder blades, how it felt to settle my cheek there when he was curled on his side, the smell of his skin, the sound of him sleeping. The clearness of his eyes. His square short fingers, his surprisingly hairy forearms, his perfectly shaped forehead - all the exqusite contours of his beloved body. Maybe that's why it occured to me: the cemetery. I can go to the cemetery. I had about 45 minutes before I was supposed to see a house that was for sale.

My mind and my body, silently yet powerfully, came together to say Mike. I'm coming. 

It wasn't with the old anxiety and worry, nor the bands of fear tightening around my heart. It was with relief. Mike, finally, I'm coming, called out my whole expansive, hurting, broken self.

So I drove all the way down Prince Street, past St. Mary's where Mike's funeral was, past bodegas with handwritten signs taped up in the windows and pregnant moms holding toddlers by the hand on the hot sidewalk and the Water Street Rescue Mission with a line of people outside waiting for some unknown yet necessary service and old men sitting on the corner. I drove through the cemetery gates and pulled over on the ill-kept gravely road and walked up the little hill to Mike's grave.

I cried and cried there in the blazing sunlight. I heard myself telling Mike through sobs how hard this was, how much I wished he could be here. But then as my crying quieted, I heard myself talking to Mike just the way I used to, which is a way I haven't inhabited for over three months.

I told him about the kids: Shakespeare camp, farm camp, friends visiting, the kittens. About the house selling, and the house buying. About the stupid credit card canceling itself on me, just because he died, about plans for Frances's birthday, about how there are so many decisions to make all by myself. About how all the money stuff that he used to manage is really hard, but it's okay. I talked to him without the piercing tightness that usually accompanies my attempts to address him; I talked to him from a place of settled sadness and intimacy.

Mike wanted to be buried, and he wanted to be buried near us. He wanted me to bring the kids to his grave; he wanted them to feel comfortable there. I don't think he thought very much about me visiting his grave in my own right. I guess I didn't either. Friday was the first time I'd ever gone alone. It was such a surprise, to feel myself slipping into my side of our old way together, sitting on the grass next to his plot, looking out the fields and woods, listening to the birdsong. Who else could I possibly give a report like that to? Only Mike. It wasn't the way I talk to myself. (And I do). It was the way I talk to him.

I didn't think Sunday would be that big a deal. I had somehow gotten through Mike's birthday, and our anniversary. But Father's Day just wasn't that important to Mike. It'll be fine, I thought.

I started the day going to church alone, and crying through the service. Then we went out with visiting friends and my mom for a lovely lunch, and I coulndn't help but notice the many families there out with fathers. I innocently checked Facebook and was bombarded by photos of women friends' husbands and fathers together. The two best dads in the world! And oh, with what pity and tears did I feel the absence of the two best dads in my world, who never had the chance to share a photo frame, but are now buried side by side.

A beautiful book was delivered at the house, and it contained a sheaf of notes from the nurses and chaplain at the hospital, people who had walked with us for so long and knew Mike well. They must have known it would arrive on Father's Day. And then I ran into a very old friend at the grocery store, someone I hadn't really talked to in years, and learned about a great sadness in her life standing together in the freezer aisle. Through it all I cried on and off with increasing frequency (and increasing disturbance for the children) until when our dear friends called and invited us for homemade sushi, I said yes, oh yes, and can I drop the kids with you and go to the cemetery first?

What a relief it is to be in that quiet green place, to sit on that hill and tell Mike how sad I am.

And while I don't feel the same fear and urgency on my way to the place where his body is buried - I don't need to fear the high fevers and breathlessness anymore - when I have to get up and walk back to my car, it hurts. It touches the rawness and pain of every goodbye I had to say to Mike when he was hospitalized. Every time it was the same; I hated to leave him. I'd linger on the other side of the heavy door; I'd cry all the way to the elevators. Sometimes a kind nurse would find me and give me a hug. Or I'd channel it into advocacy superpowers, and hunt his nurse down and review all his meds for the night and find out when the shift changed and make sure everyone had my cell.

So even though now my husband and I have been parted by death, to get up and leave the cemetery feels too much like those exhausted, sorrowful nights on 8 Lime in Lancaster and 7 Rhoads at Penn. It's an additional separation. Oh, how I hate to go.

Such a strange balancing act, to yearn for a past that can never be again and to look ahead to a future with my family that I am only beginning to imagine. To bring home kittens, to plan for summer trips, to think about buying a house, to return from the cemetery to a joyous house full of kids and friends making sushi and welcoming me with open arms, all while the deepest parts of me call out for Mike. Mike, Mike, how can we keep going like this, without you?

The only way it seems possible is if somehow he comes along with us. How can I know what God had in store for Mike, how God is faithful to us and honors our love? He is making all things new, all the time, and I don't think that can mean untethering us to our great loves and deepest anchors. Surely it means transforming all of it, the living and the dead, the past and the present and the future, the spiderwebs of love that bind us with sticky, unbreakable threads.

alliterative distinctions

A friend sent me something Elizabeth Gilbert recently posted on Facebook about her experience of grief. Her partner died six months ago. She explains that because grief is a force, and because she has allowed it to move through and ravage and humble her, she is destroyed, but not depressed. Depression, she says, is about resistance to feeling. Being destroyed by grief is about being willing to feel the feelings, though the feelings may threaten to break you. That's different.

Mike and I went to Belgium for an academic year shortly after we were married. We lived in a tiny two room apartment that was really two dorm rooms whose connecting flimsy wall had been knocked out at some point. It was by far our most spare and intimate living arrangement, furnished by a small unfinished wooden table and two chairs, a loveseat/futon, and a bed that we had fashioned from two wooden twin frames that were in the apartment when we arrived. Our big purchase was a double mattress to throw on top of them after we pushed them together, kindly delivered by a new Belgian friend who had a car and knew where to buy a cheap mattress in the outskirts of Leuven.

Our tiny dwelling had a hot plate with two burners, a mini fridge, and a sink. It had two bathrooms (from its days as two separate student rooms) so we used one as a pantry/beer cellar. (The beer! That's when I learned to enjoy it. We would buy a case of Chimay or Leffe at prices that astounded our American sensibilities and store it on the cool tile floor of the shower).  I loved the market and accessibility of things that had felt like splurges only justifiable on special occasions in our previous life: beautiful cheeses, the best chocolate, briny olives, slabs of smoked fish. So we cooked often at home, and sat at the wooden table situated below the apartment's one decorative flourish: an enormous leaded window broken into diamonds in shades of green, yellow, and rose, listening to the music we borrowed from the fantastic collection at the local library and talking about everything we were reading, doing, seeing.

Mike had a Fulbright to work on his dissertation. It was for married students, and I wasn't supposed to work while we received it. So I did what you might expect: sat in on a couple of classes, found myself an intership in Brussels, tutored some sweet Korean children whose parents worked at a branch of Samsung in Leuven. Mike and I borrowed beat up gearless bikes through the university program and joined the throngs of cyclists clogging all the city streets. I called mine the Pink Lady (before the apple of the same name arrived in grocery stores) and rode her to the university gym, and the train station on my way to Brussels, and to the university library I favored, where I the English literature and psychology books were housed.

I had a lot of time to myself. So did Mike. He had his own spot in the philosophy library, and took classes with a philosopher that showed him that it was still possible to truly think - not just think about the thoughts of philosophers gone by. He was also a believer, and his example was a gift then to Mike, who was struggling with a sense of pointlessness about academic work, his own uncertain faith path, and what it would mean to become a father. We knew we wanted to get pregnant when we came home. We figured the soonest we could have a baby was after I graduated from my social work program (I was taking a leave of absence that year). Frances was indeed born three weeks after I finished my degree. That year in Belgium was our pregnancy pregnancy; our preparation for the move into parenthood. It was a chapter set out of regular life that offered open expanses of time for all the quiet, conversation, solitude, reading, cooking, walking, and gentle adventuring that a person could want who was preparing to be changed forever.

Mike was also depressed. He had been depressed before, but was always unwilling to name it that. He did not want to be managed; he did not want to be labeled. He resisted, as Elizabeth Gilbert describes, not only the feelings but their reality as well. We didn't use the language of mental health to talk about his indecisiveness, his bouts of social withdrawal, his irritability, his relentlessly demanding and unsatisfied attitude towards himself. Depression is so tricky, because it is interwoven with who you are. But I knew, and he knew, that it was also suppressing who he was, dampening his bright spirit. We just didn't talk about it that way.

Until he did. That year in Belgium was a time of hope and newness, despite the heavy gray sky and similar mood that would overtake my husband. He was finally able to name his experience, and came up with a distinction of his own: he was depressed, not despairing. He was connected to faith, hope, and love - perhaps more strongly than ever - and he was having a really, really hard time staying afloat emotionally. But those two things could coexist, and for this realization he was grateful. He could become a Papa, and a good Papa, because despair could never sink its talons into him.

No, I'll not, carrion comfort, Despair, not feast on thee.

Depressed, not despairing. That opened up a new space for Mike.

In time, he walked right through it. Some of his happiest and most fulfilling days were with baby Frances. He contentedly listened to audio books while pushing her around town on long walks, and avoided other parents, and shoved her into my arms when I came home from work. He woke up before the sun to write his dissertation, he planned a garden, he began work on a mural in the dining room. He saw a therapist and a psychiatrist. He developed a disciplined Centering Prayer practice. He started the Lancaster Film Society in our living room with new friends. It was a time of creative, joyful engagement with life. Sometimes I stood back and marveled. Sometimes I felt a little uneasy. What happened to this guy?

Becoming a father made Mike's light shine that much brighter. Why didn't we do this earlier? he'd say. Why don't we have five more?

(He didn't always want five more; things changed, that time passed. But I kind of did. One of the things I mourn, that cancer took away, was the possibility of a fourth child. Maybe I wouldn't have longed for another baby if my beloved husband wasn't so sick, if some doctor hadn't told us to sign right here and promise you won't have any kids while on this clinical trial, if the choice hadn't been taken away. But does it matter? I loved having babies with Mike. I can't anymore, and it hurts.)

A friend asked me recently if I ever worried about myself. If I looked around with my clinical goggles on, took stock, and thought: geez, this non-normative grief thing is really messing me up. Things are pretty bad. Time to check in to the sanatorium.

I told her that I'm devastated, but not disconnected. So no, I don't worry. Many times a day I'm laid low by feelings matched in power only by those I felt falling in love with Mike. The sorrow makes my knees buckle, my chest tighten; my whole body aches. One can only submit. The alternative seems much worse to me: an isolated, walled off cave, disconnected from myself, from Mike, from everyone.

Though I suffer, I feel part of this world. I am loved and loving. I am surrounded by a community of people whom I adore. I want to tell them about what is happening now, what happened then, all of it. Miraculously they are willing to listen.

(I usually cry when I write one of these posts. This morning, it's the awareness of so many people's faithful presence, their repeated invitations and welcome of my tears, my fountain of words, their generous acceptance of the essentially self-centeredness of this dark season in my life, that has me weeping now.)

Easter arrived a little over two weeks after Mike died. I remember saying, why can't it stay Lent? Why can't it be Lent all year? The kids felt the same. Spring? Resurrection? Lilies?? Nah. We'll just sit here in shadowy winter for as long as we can stand it, thank you very much.

And though I have complained, this rainy cold spring has been a gift to me. It protected me from the gorgeous weather and happy families in the park and a general awareness of boisterous, irrepressible life celebrating itself all around me that typically arrives earlier than it did this year. It delayed an encounter with the insistent joy of green, growing spring.

But earlier this week, the rain stopped. I brushed layers of pollen off the seat of my bike which had been neglected on our porch for months. I carried it to the sidewalk and headed off to meet an entirely new friend for lunch. Someone who didn't know Mike, or our story, but wanted to listen. Gabriel had borrowed my helmet and left it somewhere I coulnd't find so I could, in good conscience, feel the cool wind blow my hair around as I coasted down James Street.

The sun was shining, the air was gentle, I was suffused with that marvelous mix of calm and quiet excitement in my body that only an easy helmet-less bike ride on a cool and bright spring morning, heading towards an unknown and somewhat risky experience, can provide.

A little part of me drew back, noticing, a bit disturbed. Meagan, can you really feel this way? Is it allowed? What about the devastation? What about Mike?

I arrived at an intersection where there was some road work. A young slender man stood in the center ready to direct traffic (I was it, at the moment) with his orange flag. I slowed to a stop and asked, is it okay if I go this way?

He looked at me and smiled broadly. His eyes were bright. Then he said,

You can go any way you want to.

Okay, I smiled back. Thanks.

As I rode away I heard him call after me, just be careful!

So there was my answer. I can feel this way. I can go any direction I want to. Each moment presents itself, and all come with dangers. I'm okay with that. I accept. Destroyed, not depressed. Devasted, not disconnected. Never, ever despairing.

Michael, Michael. I cry for you. I cry for the beauty and light of this world that penetrates all darkness. You taught me so much about that. How could I turn away from it now?

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.