force of nature

About a month ago I was knee-deep in a cold brook with Beatrice. I had suggested midway through our week in Vermont that she take a bath as the fairies probably do, in a little magical waist-high pool below a large mossy stone. She was delighted, and threw off her dirty dress. Beatrice is nearly always quick to take advantage of opportunities to undress. When our friend Wesley, age six, came down the path from the meadow to join us, Bea asked if he wanted to take his clothes off and have a fairy bath too.

No thanks.

Instead Wesley suggested we build a dam a little ways downstream, so we picked our way over the slippery river stones and looked for more to pile up in a narrow passage of the brook to try and divert the water. It was a hushed, exactly-right kind of interlude, sheltered as we were by the green, branching trees overhead and the gentle ferns and steady rocks along the banks. I tried to ignore the part of my mind that was questioning the endeavor, bracing itself every time one of the children hoisted a very heavy stone and slid on his or her way to the dam, imagining crushed toes and tears and a perilous journey back up the hill for adult help. I just couldn't bare to stop their work. The energy was so peaceful and focused. Beatrice and Wesley, miniature collaborative engineers bent over piles of rocks, seemed even more lovable than usual.

When it was time to return to the meadow, we all stepped back to take a look at our work. The water was very determined, and though we had not stopped it, we had at least changed the way it was flowing around the stones, creating a new ripple. Look at that, I said. No matter how many stones we pile up, do you see how the water always finds a way?

Beatrice, resplendent and naked, stood looking down at the stones in the brook.

Just like Papa's cancer, she said.

How did she know that? All I could say was you're right, Beatrice. It is.

And it's just like grief, which surely also always finds a way. We traveled to Colorado this month, and the majority of our second and final week there was spent on the Green River with a group of extraordinary people. Wesley's papa Zac invited us to come on the trip the night of Mike's funeral. We were sitting side by side on the floor of my mother's dining room. After the hardest week imaginable together, I was bracing myself for his family's departure. He asked me with his characteristic calm and conviction. It seemed like a good idea, and I said yes. I didn't worry too much about it. I bought plane tickets, and told the children to trust me, they would love it.

As the trip approached, our anxiety started to mount. I drove myself crazy in the days before - packing up, preparing the house for our absence, setting up kitten care, plotting the air travel and car rental - so crazy that I in fact forgot many items I had purchased especially for the trip. I cried when I realized I'd left four sun hats at home. How many times had Zac said: don't worry too much about the other stuff; the only really important thing you need is a sun hat? But I did get my family onto the plane and through the Denver airport - before I realized all I'd forgotten -  and that alone made me feel like a superhero.

The first week in Colorado, spent in the company of supportive, trusted friends, was full of gentle adventures and comfortable social time in new, beautful places. The kids were happy, and thus increasingly opposed to the idea of driving into the middle of nowhere, getting into boats they did not know how to operate that would navigate through unknown rapids, joining a group of people that they'd never met before and who themselves were lifelong friends, and spending all our time with these stranger-Coloradans - depending on them - over five solid days in the most remote wilderness they'd ever experienced. The last leg of our journey to the river was over a hot, endless dirt road. As we bumped along through clouds of dust all three children begged me to turn around, to please reconsider, to not force them into a situation that would not, in fact, be good for them at all but would rather be a nightmare.

I kept my calm and reassured and teased and smiled in the rear view mirror but of course I too was thinking that I had been insane to agree to this. We would be a burden, we would be outsiders, we would be clueless, we would embarrass Zac and Edith. The children would fall apart and I would have to take care of them on very little sleep in a public way before so many tough, capable Colorado families. I would feel like that much more of a parenting failure.

But. I did not turn around. We made it. It was hot. Everyone else on the trip was also arriving, and they hugged and joked and began doing things in preparation for the trip that I didn't understand. I started crying about ten minutes after we arrived. I introduced myself to half the people on the trip (there were 23 total) while crying. We were camping at the place where we would put-in the next day, and I couldn't find anything in the dusty trunk: not tooth brushes, not water bottles, not a flashlight. It was getting dark.

I was so tired. I was tired of driving, of defending the rightness of this questionable journey, of meeting new people and having to remember how to behave like a more stable human than I in fact am. I had not been sleeping much the week prior. I had gotten sick the day before and began running a fever in the middle of the Alamosa Walmart while I looked for last minute supplies. Every new place we landed in brought on a fresh wave of tears (and this was true for every trip of the summer - every arrival, every greeting, every first hug was like flipping a grief switch - and come to think of it, an insomnia switch - for me). And now, this silent canyon, this wide river, these strangers in a strange environment? I was utterly overwhelmed.

The next day we got ready and settled onto the well-laden boats. I kept on crying, and not sleeping, and feeling periodic waves of pain because my husband was not there with us. If he had been alive, we would never have come. Even if he had been alive and healthy we would never have done it. He would have been the most vociferous and articulate anxiety-riddled naysayer on that endless dirt road. We would never have been invited. We were in that extraordinary place because Mike died, and that made it hurt too.

And I cried because I was scared. The river trip was like one last transitional adventure before the next chapter of our lives began, the time in which I am a widow, and my three children's father has died, and we press on and go about daily life without him. The time of his illness has past; the time of immediate heartache and disorientation is ebbing away, the family and friends are returning to their routines and so, presumably, are we - whatever those are. Now I am steering this ship alone, charged with creating some kind of life that is good and full for my children, despite our collective sorrow. How will I do it? I sat looking up at those ancient canyon walls thinking, I'm afraid. I'm lost. I'm sad beyond measure. I don't know if I can do this. Mike. Mike, how can I do this?

And sometimes I cried without thought, without reason, helpless before a tidal wave of feeling. The sleeplessness fed my deterioration, but the grief-pain seemed to keep me up at night. It was like being in the grip of a storm system.

Don't get me wrong; I also had calmer moments, and time to laugh, to talk to new, caring, and brave people who didn't flinch around my pain, to delight in the wild water battles on the river, to savor wonderful, well-planned meals, to sit, to read to Beatrice at night, to watch the stars (lots of time for sleepless star-gazing), to listen to the song of the canyon wren, to watch my kids get to know the other kids on the trip, to admire the skillfulness and strength of everyone around me, to swim and wade and be in the rushing river.

But by the fourth day, the fatigue and the feelings had left me a hollow wreck. I felt ill. At the lunch table, when asked to pass the mayo, I cried in response while fumbling for the wrong condiment and couldn't even speak. I was, in that moment, desperate and unable to think how I could make it through another day. So I was directed to a hammock, and fed, and cared for, and rocked and caressed like the tiny baby that I am, that is part of me, for a very long time. A wise and gentle woman on the trip mothered me and helped me to see that almost immediately after Mike died I had had to start dealing - preparing our house for sale, making arrangements, submitting death certificates, going back to work, caring for the kids, looking for a new house to buy, managing our summer travels, and I had not had a moment to breathe. I had been so busy and then I arrived in this canyon, the most vast and open and quiet space I ever had been, with many people to help care for my children. I had nowhere to be but here and nothing to do but this - and was it any surprise then that the emotional devastation hit me so hard? And could it be any other way? And wasn't I, in fact, brimming with gratitude to be able to feel like this, to be exactly where I should be, experiencing exactly what was mine to experience, with so much beauty and love to support me through it?

She had faith that I wasn't going crazy. I rested in her nurturing presence. I wanted to be there, with her, with the water, with the sky, with all those people whom I'd just met and with the people who had been a part of my heart for many years too.

I didn't sleep much that night either, but the next day I felt scoured out and peaceful. Able to enjoy the long day on the river before take out. Incidentally, I was on a boat that day with Beatrice and Wesley, my dam-builders, as well as Gabriel and Zac. The dream team. Best snacks, best games, best I'm-bored whines, best everything. The wilderrness within had been so harrowing; the wilderness without became more inviting and somehow milder once I had emerged from it.

(It helped that it was gently overcast, after days of blazing sun.)

This terrible grief path has taught me so much that would have been easier not to know. When wrested from your partner, your team-mate, your two-person system, one is forced to contend with herself. There is no one to push off of or agree with; no one to blame, look to, question, compromise with, care for. It's just me in here. Holy shit.

When I left all my duties behind, I discovered what lay beneath them. There is always so much to do; especially during Mike's illness, I felt I could not stop. Then I sometimes resented the ceaseless intensity of my pace. Now I have begun to see the other side - the refuge that doing so much has been, and surely will continue to be. When you aren't busy, the hurt rises and crests at the surface and it is a wild, powerful force.

I have been taking care of everyone else and helping to contain and hold their feelings for many years now. In the thick of cancer I said to friends more than once that there was no room for my own feelings. It was too bad, but I didn't think it could be any other way. Now that I am no longer managing a crisis, I think I have to intentionally make some room. I'm still a therapist parenting three recently bereaved children who is in the middle of selling and buying a house and preparing for the fourth move in four years but I think it is time for me to embrace that the courageous thing for me to do right now is to continue seeking canyons.

It would be so much easier to concern myself with everyone else's feelings and needs. And that's probably mostly what I'll do. Force of habit. But now I know that my own are inside too, waiting for a little space, waiting for me to find the courage to endure them. It's my responsibility to do that; I can't blame circumstance or other people or cancer or my children for making it impossible. It's my own work to do.

down to the river

I was at the eye doctor's earlier today for an appointment, thinking to myself: why can I barely breathe in a medical office? Responding to simple questions takes unexpected amounts of effort. Just staying put in a chair is so damn hard. After Mike died I started taking care of things I'd neglected during his illness, like teeth cleanings and annual exams, so I've been in quite a few waiting rooms lately. It's always an emotional challenge.

As soon as I registered that thought - why does sitting here feel like torture? - some other part of my brain replied duh Meagan. Doctor's offices are the site of your family trauma. They are the places where you had to digest countless pieces of bad news, or good news that turned bad within days, or simply sit next to Mike in miserable silence. There's nothing mysterious about having to remind yourself to breathe at the eye doctor's, even if nothing particularly scary is at stake.

I wonder how many hours we spent together with our attention focused on an exam room door, waiting for the doctor to finally come in? How many hours did we spend in obedient silence while a doctor swiveled away from us on his chair, clacking on a keyboard, pondering a screen? (Whoever would have guessed the extent to which the adoption of electronic medical records would dehumanize and, I think, re-paternalize the doctor-patient relationship? One is expected to sit quietly, not unlike a child at the dinner table who can only speak when spoken to, while the provider faces away from you, clicking and typing away indefinitely, occasionally asking a question about symptoms without actually making eye contact (let alone body contact). What can staring at a screen have to do with healing a hurting body? One is not supposed to acknowledge the strangeness of this bizarre social situation; one is supposed to be a good patient and submit to it. Mike would get so angry at me when I would bring up symptoms he thought weren't important, or dwell on something the doctor obviously didn't think mattered. I hated that. But now when I think back, probably some of the question-asking and forcing doctors to spend time on things that perhaps weren't essential was my way of wresting a little power back. Of insisting on making the relationship between Mike and me and our providers into something at least a little collaborative. Of forcing our experience, and Mike's body, into the room with that computer screen. See him. Mike is the only one who knows what's really happening in his body. We live with this terror day and night. See us.)

So anyway. The kids and I recently returned from a meandering trip to visit friends and family in three beautiful, water-rich locales: Massachusetts, the coast of Connecticut, and Rockaway Park in New York City. I was afraid to go. I was afraid of how sad I would be without Mike there with us. I was especially afraid of Madison, CT, where we all were together at the exact same time last year.

That was the hardest. Last year I spent the week - which includes my birthday - worried about Mike, who started running fevers again on day two at our friends' wonderful beach cottage, always a sign of disease returning. I couldn't find enough blankets to help him through the chills that began the fever cycle. We kept debating whether or not to leave early. He couldn't participate much because he was too sick and miserable. We ended up staying - the children were having the best time - but I was quietly distraught. Our friend Teb and I share a birthday, and Mike managed to be a part of that big, raucous, celebratory dinner with everyone: us, Teb and family, and Teb's parents. It was capped by a glorious ice cream cake. I was forty years old that day.

This year, it rained at the beach on my birthday. I spent the morning in a laundry mat. I hadn't slept well for about three nights and felt shaky. I retired upstairs in the afternoon, telling everyone I needed a rest, and spent hours on my twin bed while the oscillating fan slowly yet insistently shook its head no, no, no blowing back and forth across my bare legs, a novel open facedown on my belly, listening to the kids play downstairs, crying and crying. The sadness went on and on, as if I were suspended in some kind of terrible grief-jello inside of which time slowed to a near-stop, trapped by the pain of growing older without Mike and the clarity of memories from last year and the year before that too (Mike's doctor Owen called on the night of my 39th birthday to tell us Mike's relapse was confirmed by the biopsy he'd had the week before in New York; Mike was already asleep and I cried on the phone after we'd talked it all through, surprisingly myself by impulsively telling him in a spirit of feeble protest: but Owen, today is my birthday).

The tears didn't stop. I wasn't sure what to do after awhile. I heard the kids shush each other in the hall outside the door because Mama was sleeping. I heard life go on below, people coming and going, and I thought: this is what it's like to be on the outside of life. And also, this is what it's like to not know how to step back into life. Finally I did the only thing that made sense: I put on my bathing suit and walked downstairs, cried with my friends on the bottom step, and then walked around the corner and across the sand and into the bracing, seaweedy Long Island Sound. Stroke, stroke, kick in the cold water towards the horizon, until I felt like myself again.

That worked pretty well. The rest of the night was marvelous.

In Rockaway, on our last evening, the children were settled in various activities with our friends after a long hot day walking in Brooklyn. I wanted to get back into the ocean one last time, before we left in the morning, and no one wanted to come with me. So again I went by myself to the water (which is  a few yards from our friends' airy, inviting home). The air was chilly and the wind was strong. The hair on my arms was standing on end. I sat in the sand, facing the water, hoping I'd warm up enough to brave the cold rough waves, whose mood seemed downright aggravated. Instead I watched a group of skinny boys leaping with increasing abandon from the now-vacant lifeguard's chair, and another family at the water's edge daring each other to get into the water (no one went in past their knees, despite one teenage girl's attempts at surprise pushes). An outageously beautiful, sunned, European-looking couple began making out a few yards to my right, past the leaping boys. Ryan stopped over to say hello on his way to surf before dinner. I watched his long, spare, wet-suited body paddling into the irritable waves.

I beheld the water, and the people around it, and I cried. I thought how drops of water make up those waves that seem to be alive, that seem to have distinctive moods, and how all those drops move across the earth, touching shores that I will never see, and many that I have.

Water, ever-moving, touches every place. Might it touch every time? As I sat shivering on the sand, those waves connected me to a hundred times and places spent with Mike.

In a Montenegrin coastal village, sunning ourselves by the deep blue Adriatic Sea, deciding it was - despite our initial aversion to the concrete block hotel and rough manners of the concierge and endlessly chatty British tourists we were supposed to sit beside during meals - a perfect place, and that we would have to find a way to invite all our favorite people to come for a blowout tenth wedding anniversary week to this sleepy beach town where, judging from the reaction of cafe and hotel workers, we seemed to be the first American tourists ever. The gorgeous deep waters, the crumbling Orthodox monasteries built into the green hillsides, the empty coastline - we loved it.

On a pedal boat, cycling our legs furiously in an inlet of the Chesapeake Bay, cursing the very idea that this would be fun on a steamy day, sweating inside our obligatory life jackets, Mike trying to convince red-cheeked Frances that she was "steering" our boat while I held baby Gabriel, who at that developmental moment was a terrible napper. We all agreed: the only good thing about that ill-conceived voyage at Quiet Waters park was the pleasure of seeing Gabriel fall asleep immediately, rocked by the gentle movements of the water, and stay asleep until the moment we returned to land.

On the bank of the Susquehanna River, elated at the midway point of the Tucquan's Glen trail, accompanied by our children and Teb and Diana's daughters Tessa and Annika, smiling at each other in amazement and gratitude at what Mike could do during that gorgeous, golden fall on a clinical trial that had very few side effects.

On a dock that jutted into a lake near Newpaltz, NY, where Mike and I, at 23 and 21, had decided to have a real vacation. We stayed at a bed and breakfast owned by a man named Doug who gave us an exhaustive tour of our colonial-era room, which included - memorably - him citing the year that the hinges on our door were made. We couldn't even look at each other during his humorless lecture, knowing we'd start laughing and not be able to stop. The next morning we went to a lake, and soon after we arrived a busload of middle schoolers from the Bronx did too. Mike and I were delighted by everything that weekend, including the kids, and I remember jumping off the dock, swimming out into the bright lake, and faintly hearing a girl sitting near Mike, who was still on the dock, remark: wow, she is really good at swimming. Yeah, he said, she is.

At the beach in Lewes, swimming near the shore in the Delaware Bay, watching Mike sitting in a folding chair and holding a squinty, sandy, not-so-sure-about-this-whole-beach-thing Beatrice on his lap beneath the shade of an umbrella. She was four months old. I felt impossibly free and happy, feeling the water gently holding me afloat, moving without encumbrance, seeing my husband and children on the shore, my niece and nephews, all of life enacted on the bright land while I watched from the cool sea.

Along the Mediterranean, midway through our month-long European honeymoon, on a hot and sweaty hike along the trail that connected the Cinque Terre villages, and then ending at the charming, quiet, rocky beach near the apartment we'd rented for a week, sliding into that inviting blue water together, grinning from ear to ear, not even needing to articulate the thought we knew we were both having: are we really here, swimming off the coast of Italy, surrounded by all this beauty, absolutely contented in body and spirit - can it be real?

And so much more water touched our lives: a North Carolina hike with all three kids that brought us to the most glorious waterfalls; a sad, irritable afternoon spent by the Carribean; crossing the waterways of Annapolis over and over, an exhiliaring afternoon in the frothing cold water of Soda Dam in New Mexico, a freezing dip in a lake outside the inn owned by my coworkers' parents in the Catskills, an unexpected summer plunge into the East River. All those scalding hot baths, the only place I could stand to be after Mike died.

I've spent my entire adult life with someone who was always quick to admit that he wasn't a strong swimmer - who was relatively indifferent to the lure of water - yet he put his toes in with me over and over again. He knew I always had to get in. He never grumbled about it.

What is water's allure about? More than any other element, it enlivens. It buoys. One rises and falls in the waves without a fight. You can float on its surface, suspended between air and sea. Its murky deeps stir up vague fears. The very sound of it triggers a nervous system down-shift.

Water, touching every place and every time, connects me to the becoming of myself, a woman who is indeed many things, but as this sorrow keeps spinning out I see that central among them is a person who grew up in relationship to, and defined against, and yearning for, and in conversation with, and more often than not completely absorbed by Mike Brogan, a man unlike any I have ever known.

Waves, tell me, who can I possibly be now that he no longer walks beside me?

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?