farewell time

Today we woke up in Buffalo with our friends, having drunk our fill of Niagara Falls over the weekend, and tonight we will sleep in our own beds back in Lancaster, having spent a good portion of the day driving through New York State and Central Pennsylvania. Some spirit of that beautiful country seemed captured in a tall billboard we spotted today that declared Every Day is Hump Day at the Adult Outlet, featuring a personable peach nestled up against a rather tall eggplant on one side, and on the other, Find out who Jesus REALLY is! with a phone number in bold below that read something like 1-800-I REPENT.

That, coupled with the gun outlets and flags, really brought out the snobbish asshole in me on the way there. I was joking around with the kids in an increasingly unhinged way every time we passed another XXX sign. But on the way home, I felt a lot milder about the whole thing. I mean, it's not my culture, not my language, but really, is it so very contradictory for lust and spiritual longing to be pressed up against each other like that? Can't crass sexuality and Jesus occupy two sides of the same sign? You might think they are there to cancel each other out, so to speak. But maybe they just bring out something potent in each other, by seeming but not actually being opposites. 

I missed church today, but I also felt a bit off the hook by the fact that we were traveling. I never know what to do with Easter. Ever since becoming a widow, I don't feel that comfortable with anything that's supposed to be all good, all triumphant. (And growing up UU and Jewish, Easter was never a big holiday for us; I only began to figure out my relationship to it as an adult.) I will always remember Mike positively glowing on the last Easter he was alive, so close to the pain of Good Friday and the miracle of resurrection, so delighted by the fact that He is risen! which he smilingly proclaimed only 10% ironically to me that morning on the sidewalk after church. The other 90% was pure faith and joy. He was alive, the sun was shining, he was well enough for church with his family, Jesus was risen. Sound the trumpets. 

I was genuinely happy to see him happy. I treasure the photos we took that day. But I wasn't singing out He is Risen! from the rooftops to anyone who would listen, because I wasn't feeling that way myself. I mean, is He really? Is anyone? Will they be? What if they just get cancer and die and leave you all alone? What if suffering is always here, even and especially contained within the joyful moments, and you can't ever blast it out with lilies and brass?

Like last week, I began the termination process in earnest with two of my treasured clients. 

One is a junior, and as long as all goes as planned we have another year together before graduation brings our work to an end. One is a senior, and though we haven't worked together for long, it has been very meaningful, and the fact that we have but a handful of sessions left before she launches out into the world struck her as terribly sad.

Termination is the weirdest, coldest clinical word. It simply means ending. Maybe we therapists use it because we need a little distance from the emotional reality of investing in work that calls on your whole self and that, if successful, ends. 

In an ideal world it happens when the client is truly ready, in their own time. The saying goodbye is bittersweet. Happy-sad. It represents the beauty of compassion born of suffering, growth, and a readiness to part with a source of support because it is no longer needed. But if the therapeutic experience really has facilitated all that healing, the relationship was central to it. It means the client felt deeply cared for. So the goodbye can't not hurt.

And the goodbye is harder when it's not time yet. In my work with college students, sometimes we have to end because it's time to graduate, but there is so much more we could do together.

But like being alive, like everything we do and every relationship we treasure, the fact that we are ending and our awareness of it makes the present moment together extra tender and deep. Deeper than it could ever be if our work were open-ended. Because of this, and so many other reasons that you likely share, spring is full of feeling for me.

Being brave enough to talk about it, to share the sadness, to say the words I'm afraid to end with you - this blows me away when it happens spontaneously in the chair opposite. This kind of vulnerability takes so much courage, it overflows one's heart. It's especially moving because I myself am often afraid to bring it up, and put it off longer than I should, knowing it will hurt to make it explicit. 

So my junior is someone I have worked with for years now, and who has taught me a lot about being brave. She has serious trauma in her past, and carries a lot of anxiety in her body as a result. When she admitted that she was afraid she might be making up her struggles, or that maybe she isn't really unwell, or maybe she doesn't deserve to be in counseling anymore, I just waited, listened. We listened together. It didn't take long for her to discover she was afraid I would leave. She was afraid this would end. 

So we talked about what it is like that her struggles are real, that she should be here with me, now, and to face our eventual ending, together. When she walked out of my office and I shut my door behind her, I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and hugged my knees to my chest.

Right now I am dating a man that I care deeply about. It's crazy how vulnerable it feels to care like this. Sometimes I feel so frightened that the door to my heart threatens to shut of its own accord. It's scary for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that somehow or other this relationship too will end. Sometimes I can feel the ending pulsing within its beginning. The two are so intertwined, they can't be opposites. They are two threads of connection: openness to a deepening future, and grief that the openness cannot go on forever.  

I think the mystery of resurrection has something to teach me, if only I could be brave enough to receive it. Something about a tenderness that transcends the tenderness of endings and permits fear to slide from its fingers, no longer needed. That beaming joy Mike embodied five years ago wasn't premised on a forced forgetting of his own suffering; he never turned away from hard truths. He knew this would all end far too soon, yet on that spring morning, for a moment, he opened his heart wider still. 

Maybe next Easter I won't spend seven hours in the car. Maybe I'll go to church, and like my client, I'll find the courage to tell God the truth about how afraid I am, how Easter makes me want to brace myself for all the endings.

I'll be scared, and I'll try to listen.

graduation

Tuesday was Beatrice's ninth birthday. 

The year she turned five, March 1st began very early. Not that night and day were meaningful categories in the hospital. But it was still dark when I accompanied Mike from his room on the eighth floor downstairs to surgery to repair the ruptured feeding tube apparatus inside of him that was causing acute pain with every tracheostomy-facilitated cough. And the coughing was constant. Everything hurt then, for him and for me, though nothing more in that moment than the awareness that I was missing Beatrice's fifth birthday because of all this. This torrent of disease, pain, medical system failure, constant uncertainty. The torrent took everything away with it. 

My sister was in town and she and my mom helped make Beatrice's party happen. It was at a trampoline park. They sent me pictures while I sat anxiously in the waiting area. Life kept happening, even the lives of our children, and we were missing it.

This year I planned Beatrice's party at a little bowling alley/arcade in town. It was last Sunday. I met some of her school friends for the first time and admired their flashing smiles, buoyant energy, nine year old naughtiness, long limbs, deep down sweetness. Three parents spontaneously decided to stay with me during the party, and later my mom joined too, everyone shrugging off the fact that staying was a kindness, knowing I would likely get overwhelmed by the responsibility of all those children running wild in an open space filled with so much fun. I felt quietly cared for by their presence, and watched Beatrice glowing, dancing with triumph with her friends as their bowling balls bounced like enormous slow motion pinballs, back and forth off the bumpers, eventually making contact with a handful of pins. 

Yes!!!

I thought to myself: maybe I've outgrown the grief that has accompanied her birthday over the past three years. Maybe I can finally experience this simply as a special day for Beatrice, unsullied by the trauma of Mike's final harrowing days on earth. Wouldn't that be great?

On Monday night while Beatrice was at dance class I was feeling overly sensitive to various unimportant domestic irritants and my own parenting shortfalls and so announced I was running out to get some final bits to gussy up the birthday. In the car, alone (finally), pulling out onto Walnut Street, I felt a geyser of pain rise up within me, completely shocking in the suddenness of its presence. I cried and cried. Moaned and sobbed is more like it. Vocalized something dark and sharp while hot tears fell onto my lap in the driver's seat. 

Wegman's is about a six minutes' drive from my house, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot the geyser was spent. Only the shuddering aftershocks remained, and those soon passed too. She was so little. That was the thought that started and ended it: she was so little. 

How could Beatrice's little body have received all that pain around her? Where did it go? Is it stored still in her lengthening bones, her soft warm skin? 

Lately I myself feel like a human lightning rod. I receive the hot energy of other people's feelings; they pass through the safety of my body on their way into the earth. I sit cross-legged and tall in my soft burgundy chair at work all day and invite, welcome, receive the crackling emotional energy of my clients. Then I walk home and do my best to be present to the changeable kitchen weather that three children generate. I remind myself to breathe. I conduct lightning. It's a lot, but I can do it.

The difference for me is that now I really can conduct emotions; they move through me and I am unharmed. Tired, sure. Sometimes I need to retreat to my bedroom with a book. And when I can't take a lunchtime walk to shake out the morning sessions' emotions that didn't quite make it into the soil I'm bummed. 

But the essential experience has changed because my own feelings now also fill my body, and I try to listen to what they tell me. I am learning through faltering, earnest practice to permit them to come and to go, to hold them compassionately while they are here; because of this I can ground other people's energy in a sustainable way. In those crisis cancer days and the months that followed Mike's death everyone else's feelings swirled in a scorched field inside me. By the time he died I was burned to nothing. When someone asked me how I was during those years, I went blank. How was I? I wasn't. Nothing could grow. The pain of my husband and my children and to a lesser extent the circles of caring family and friends around us seared every available space to ash. I didn't believe my own pain to be relevant. 

But being human is an exquisite, surprising thing, and so much has been sprouting in my ash-enriched insides. My own therapy, work with my clients (in which recent trainings have empowered me to be more deeply compassionate and present), my immersive experience at the mindfulness retreat, meditation, reading, yoga, dance, all of it has been teaching me to cherish this imperfect body, this vast inner space, this spirit. In stolen quiet moments I sometimes rest my hands on my body with all the tenderness motherhood has taught me. 

There is more room here than I ever knew. 

My clients who are preparing to graduate are taking stock of the past four years, realizing how much they have grown, mustering up the courage for their next uncertain steps. They are entering a time of transition and new possibility. On March 12th it will be four years since we lost Mike, four years since I held his hand. To be without him, to know what we all endured, to witness the pain of my children - it hurts so much, just as much as it ever did. It is my relationship to the pain that is shifting. 

I look back on the past four years, and I am proud of how much we have all grown. I know now my pain is relevant; I know how precious I am to me. I am ready for the next unknowable chapter. 

 

now and then

Lately my inner and outer life have been encountering one another with a particular curiosity and fizz, which every so often results in an alchemical story-busting magic. Like an onion that you had no idea held layers beneath its taut brown skin peeled back and then peeled back again. I have held old stories tight to my chest about what my life and I am supposed to be like - tight as the layers of an onion pressed against one another. I have held them so close I didn't know they were there. 

When circumstances conspire to allow me to hold an old story out away from my body so I can see it properly and recognize the thin places where it isn't really true, I feel exhilarated. And scared and sad. Stories about what I am supposed to perform for others, how I am supposed to look, what I can control, what I should accomplish and desire, what I should be able to contain and manage when it surges inside me. 

I found myself unexpectedly crying the other day in the middle of telling someone how amazing it is that we can keep growing and becoming more truly ourselves as time passes, despite our culture's suggestion that aging is a one-way trip to something smaller, lesser than what we once were. I am thrilled that I get to set down old stories that are no longer and maybe never were true and consider new ones that reveal something closer to what really is. 

The tears were for Mike, who never got to experience this distinct stage of life, one defined less by striving and articulating one's path and more by consolidation of and learning from all those grasping years before. 

I was forty when Mike died. I felt crushed by the almost immediate awareness that an essential part of me died with him. I mourned for my children who lost both their father and the mother they used to have, someone happily partnered and far more resilient and cheerful and competent than the raw grieving wreck I knew myself to be. 

They really did lose the old me. She is never coming back. The strange thing is that now, nearly four years later, I don't want her to.

I like my forties. I like how I make decisions and communicate and reflect on what I want. I like swearing freely and learning to ask for help and my fledgling efforts at growing spiritually. Even more surprising, I like the family we have become, the relationships we push and pull and play inside of as everyone keeps growing in his or her unique, relentless, stunning fashion. 

But so much of who we have become finds its roots in Mike's cancer and death. It freed us to be more honest, loving, angry, mindful of things other people often aren't. We like that. Which is, to say the least, confusing. 

It is profoundly sad to feel your strengths, the things you like about yourself, inextricably tied to your deepest loss. I long for sturdier bridges to connect the before times to the abundant present. I would like my children to know that all of this links to all of that, even if our world hadn't ruptured in between.

Last night at bedtime I told Beatrice how proud her papa would be - is - of her. 

Why? 

It's just the way you are, Beatrice. The way you think and move and make jokes and sleep and snuggle. Just being who you are is being someone your papa is proud of and loves so much.

Oh. 

And that brought forth a wave of anguish, a deep grief over her rapidly fading and lost memories. She feels left out. She wishes she had had more time. So we took out the book of photos I made for her birthday last year and told stories about all the images of Beatrice and Papa, all the moments captured that prove they were together and loved each other well. 

She feels guilty for not feeling sadder. She always tells me this with her eyes filled with tears. She feels guilty for liking our family the way it is, and not knowing what it was like before Papa got sick and died. If he walked in the front door right now, would he be a stranger to her?

No he wouldn't, I said. It might take you a few minutes. But you would know Papa, and he would know you. That never changes.

We cried for a long time, for how awful it is that he never met Ramona the dog, or our funny cats, or lived in this house, or knew about Beatrice's third grade teacher - so much of what structures everyday life. It's terrifying to think the gulf between us widens as we all grow. In one way, I know it never really does. But still I feel frightened. I can't lose him over and over. 

Many years ago, when our friend Edith asked Mike how he knew he was ready to marry me even though there was no way to know how I would change and he would change and what would happen for the rest of our lives, he said he felt confident that he would love whoever I became. However much changed, at the root of it, he had faith that I would still be me, a person he deeply loved. 

That can be true in the other direction too, even though it didn't occur to me then. However much I change, my love is unaltered. Maybe that slippery abstract truth is one of the bridges I long for. Maybe it can support all of us as I keep learning new stories and tentatively stepping into the truth they offer. 

Even so, I wish he'd met Ramona.  

lights in the dark

Last Friday around 4:45, I checked my phone and saw a text from my mom that read martinis tonight? I had just finished my last session of a long day, a long week. There had simply been more than I could handle with equanimity and I felt shaky. I had a pile of notes to write and it was nearly dark outside. 

My response? OMG YES. I decided the notes were for the next morning, packed everything up, and walked home through campus, through the park, down the cracked sidewalks to my house which was dark and still on the outside, bright and busy on the inside. I dumped my bag by the door, checked in with the kids, and made a screen time plan with Beatrice that I knew would be flouted the minute I shut the front door behind me. Then I walked to my mom's house, taking the alley and entering through the tall gate into her backyard, where I saw a sight that stopped me in my tracks. 

There was the menorah, aglow in the center of the bay window that faces out back. It was the sixth night. Each narrow candle wore a beautiful halo around its flickering flame. The bright light it cast into the darkness in which I stood outside was so improbable. The only reasonable response was to breathe, settle, and allow the stillness to touch me, if only for a moment.

Then I went inside and told my mom all about my crushing week, and drank and ate a lot, and felt like a grateful imperfect human connected to another human in a fragile precious world.

Before I sat down early the next morning to tackle the notes, on a whim I found a squat little candle and set it on my kitchen table. I made coffee and lit the candle and pulled out my laptop. Inhale, exhale. There I sat, picking up the clinical pieces of the week and putting them where they belonged, with a tiny fire to remind me that a person can really only do one thing at a time.

Beatrice and I went to our old church - the one we once attended with Mike, and left soon after he died - to make an advent wreath a few days before that. I had gone to services two or three times by myself, nudged when a friend kindly invited me sans pressure to give it another try (shortly after I mentioned I was feeling adrift at/about church in a previous post). Beatrice was totally not into busting in a new-to-her social environment and I can't remember now what I initially bribed her with. Turns out there was cookie decorating so that worked pretty well. In the end I made the wreath outside in the courtyard without her, chatting with old friends, as she hooked up with two other kids and ran wild and free all around the church campus. I couldn't have been happier.

Then on Sunday Beatrice grumpily agreed to come to church with me. On the walk there she replayed her worries about me ditching her to have boring adult conversations with old ladies and also what if the kids don't include her? But the kids are, it turns out - at least sometimes - angels. They welcomed her and just before the service, one of them ran up to Bea and asked if she wanted to torch with her in church.

Sure! she said, happy to be included.

Then Bea paused and looked at me. What's torching?

I explained it meant being an acolyte. Carrying a tall candle and being part of the church service. Wearing a red and white outfit. Ruthie, her new friend, insisted she could train Beatrice up in the next ten minutes and pulled her into the sanctuary. 

I sat there, dumbfounded. What was happening? My shy and hesitant Beatrice, my church-averse darling, donning an acolyte's ensemble?

I need not tell you how full my heart was, watching her process in, smiling beneath her mask. I tried not to be embarrassing or weird, or make eye contact for too long and cause her to second guess the whole thing. 

The part that really sent me over the edge was seeing three or four friends - women who have welcomed my presence back in this old stone building after such a long absence with nary a question or hesitation - whipping out their phones and snapping photos of this unexpected bright moment, grinning at me with their eyes, indicating they'd text the pictures later. They knew. We all shared it.

That evening we listened to Sufjan Stevens sing Christmas songs as we do every year and decorated our tree, which is now dripping with symbols and reminders of the many chapters of our lives, including Mike's childhood with ornaments from his family and mine with the candy cane I made in second grade and the little wooden church to commemorate my dad's new job in Providence in 1980, and all the Christmases of our children's lives. It was the least sad, most sweet tree-decorating since we lost Mike. After that we went to my mom's and ate latkes and lit the candles and opened her presents with friends. 

How I long for ritual, for everyday ways to invite the sacred into our lives. How bounteous is this season in the ways it answers that desire for holiness! There are so many lights in the dark. 

Last night Gabriel and I went to Target. We needed a few odd things and were already out after picking up books at the library. We so rarely run errands together; it felt good. We strolled past an aisle of candles and he noted I was on a real candle kick these days. 

Yep. Let's look.

We pulled down our masks to stick our noses in all of them and commented on their fake smells, until we found an enormous glass candle with three wide wicks. Three! It smelled fake too - but awesome-fake. Amber Applewood. Whatevs. We called it a mobile fireplace (wish we had a real one) and decided we absolutely needed it. It's your advent present, Mama, said Gabriel. We'll light it at dinner and feel warm.

And that's just what we did.