snow launch

I am sitting at gate T10 in the Atlanta airport, and my flight is delayed. I just traversed the very same hallway where this past July I said goodbye to Gabriel (who was then heading off for thirty days of backpacking in Wyoming) and promptly broke down in tears, only to be comforted by an angelic airport worker who held me in her strong arms and pretend-scolded there's no crying in my airport! 

I told you about it then. That goodbye was a dry run for this goodbye. Yesterday morning Gabriel set out walking through the snow in the direction of the Appalachian Trail with two intrepid friends. They, and their families, stayed with us in a cozy rental house near Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the trail, for a send-off weekend. When a big snowfall made it impossible for us parents to drive the hikers to the trailhead, they decided to walk the fifteen miles there instead. 

He was so ready. Unplowed country roads and single digit temps were not about to stop him. 

Gabriel devised this plan in July 2024. Back then, when I met him at camp in North Carolina, I was coming from an unprecedented ten days of travel with either my boyfriend, my friends, or myself in the Smoky Mountains. He'd had six weeks of his own mountain living by that point, and it gave rise to a plan: to graduate high school a year early and hike the AT during a gap year before college. He sat me down in the dining hall with expectant, big eyes to tell me all about it. 

Okay, I said.

Of course I had questions: who would he go with? How would he learn the needed skills? What about his plans for senior year? And then there were the waves of heart-dropping realization: he would be leaving us sooner than anticipated. The profound sadness of losing our buoyant, funny, big-hearted boy.  

But I had no real doubts. The healing effects of hikes and porch sitting and open time with people who are dear to me were threading through my body like warm light as we had that first talk about the AT. I wanted the same peace and connection to the natural world for him, times a million.

He did it all over the next 19 months: changed his classes and graduated a year early, researched the trail, learned wilderness skills, applied to college, took his friends on lots of camping trips and long walks, worked at small farms to save money, bought lots of fancy ultralight backpacking stuff. Tolerated the loneliness of choosing a path unlike any of his peers and the attendant bouts of feeling adrift and uncertain. Accidentally had a merino buff sent to Frances at Princeton. Forgot his gaiters at home. Shopped with me in a Publix outside Atlanta after we landed this past Friday for things like tuna in foil packets, instant rice, dried fruit. 

As when Frances left for college, I felt a strange calm in the lead up to his launch. I wasn't worried. I just kept doing the next thing we needed to do. But about two weeks ago, on a super cold evening walk, I turned to Gabriel and said: Wait. How will you warm up when you aren't walking or in your sleeping bag? Won't you have to sit still in the snow sometimes? 

He patiently explained to me how they would navigate cold and snowy weather. I asked some follow ups. My anxiety was starting to bubble. He took a deep breath, stopped walking, and turned to look at me, placing his hands firmly on my shoulders. 

Sometimes, Mama, I'll be uncomfortable. And that's okay. 

We hugged. Right, yes. He was signing up for uncomfortable. He was signing up for everything the earth has to offer: the cold, the warm, humidity, rain and sun, insects and roots and boulders and bears. The inviting rhododendron fairy thickets of Western North Carolina. That was the point. He wanted a glorious uncomfortable trek, all his own.

Sometimes when I'm with other families, especially those I perceive as having their shit together with two living parents at the helm, I feel self-conscious about my widowed status and varied shortcomings. I feel alone. I get defensive and think things like: well, I'd make those kinds of dinners and be able to show up to all the events and volunteer at school and arrange for lots of enriching activities if I had 100% more parenting power in this family too! I would plan and research more, set better screen limits, have some rules and actually enforce them if I had a whole extra adult who happened to love these children as much as I do helping out around here. You know, someone like their dad. 

It's a weird, dangerous thought-pathway to follow. I don't recommend it. 

So I was a little afraid I'd be gripped by the familiar involuntary combo of self-pity, defensiveness and fear of having screwed over my kids when we arrived at the rental house on Friday evening. The other parents, whom I'd never met, led the weekend planning efforts and seemed to know a lot more about the trail and what the boys were facing. I was sharing the house with two dads, two moms, a grandma, two sisters and a brother. Our numbers were weak in comparison; it was just me and Gabriel. Beatrice wanted to avoid this extended goodbye and stay home, and Frances was at school. 

But my bad widow-mom fears never made so much as a peep. We parents whispered our worries around the kitchen island while the kids played pool in the basement and rolled in the snow outside. We turned to each other for help in discerning where the new boundaries should be, for support with the many unknowns ahead.

Laurie and Julie and I curled on couches, watching the blustering snow, gripping our cooling mugs of coffee in maternal solidarity. We all knew things would never be the same again, so we cried and laughed and told a lot of stories. Saturday was spent admiring snow, taking walks, pondering maps, comparing gear, and generally managing the uncertainty of our children starting a thru hike in the midst of an emergency winter weather event.

Gabriel and I took a long walk in the snow and talked about everything. All of it. That really helped. When we got back to the house I told him I wished we could keep walking because it was so beautiful out. He said, I love how being in nature makes you happy, Mama. 

Sunday morning he and I sat on the rug and waited while the ten other people slowly got themselves ready to walk to the end of the long drive for the big sendoff. I showed him how I was wearing my necklace made of Papa's wedding ring for the occasion. I couldn't suppress my tears. I leaned on his strong meaty shoulder and thought about how he was once a seven pound person who slid out of my body with surprising peacefulness. We finally headed out, toggling between making ourselves laugh crazily with imagined absurdist trail names and allowing my tears to do what they needed to do the whole slippy way to the road. 

Then we took some pictures, and then we said goodbye.

I walked alone in the snowy woods after that so I could cry and miss Mike and ask God to please watch over my capable boy. When my toes went numb and I was all cried out, I went back to the quiet house, where everyone else was taking care of themselves in their own ways. 

I had to delay my flight because the roads were impassable. We all arranged to stay an extra day. This morning as we packed up the house it hit me all at once: unlike dropping Frances off at college, and contrary to my expectations, I wasn't alone in this launch. 

Because ever since Mike died, I've felt my aloneness as a parent keenly at every big transition with my children. Especially when surrounded by other proud moms and dads exchanging looks and squeezing each others' hands. But this time, I felt the solid tether of love between me and my boy and the support of the other parent-friends who were in it with me. I was so grateful. I was amazed. It was a widowed mama first. 

And then, after a wild, lengthy hunt for jumper cables with my new friend Dillon, I left via the long driveway myself. The scratch marks of bare trees on mountain ridges against the bright sky, rusted pick up trucks by the side of the road, melting patches of snow everywhere, blue backs of gentle mountains in the distance, a downloaded Spotify mix Gabriel's friend Leo made me two summers ago that I listened to when I was driving without a signal through these same mountains - all of this accompanied me on my way to the airport today, rooting me in this moment and in all the moments that came before and led up to it, all the way back to arriving at camp in Western North Carolina when I was nine years old and breathing in the green wet air and knowing I was home. 

The woods are becoming Gabriel's home now, and his friends are becoming part of his family. 

I miss him so much already, yet I wouldn't bring him home to fill the house with reading sprawled on the couch, listening to Jurassic 5 and John Prine in the kitchen, and playing games with his friends at the dining room table for all the money in the world. Mother love is mind-boggling. It may be washed with tears and edged with uncertainty, but his bright flourishing is a joy, all the way down.

not knowing

I came down to my kitchen grumpily on Saturday morning, after a fitful night of sleep. A lone soup spoon lay face down in the drain of the little bar sink, surrounded by a spray of coffee grounds and looking not unlike a murder victim. We normally use that sink exclusively for drinking water, and so without any other dish-washing happening, the spoon had remained there untouched for at least three days. 

In an ill-fated private experiment enacted by countless mothers before me, I was waiting to see how long it would languish there before someone noticed. Predictably, no one had bothered to put it in the dishwasher. I knew if I didn't move the pathetic lonely thing, no one would, and that depressed me.

But my boyfriend came for the weekend, and even though he was suffering from post-vaccine ickiness, he must have eventually done what my children would not, because the spoon and it's surrounding mess disappeared. It's for the best that he inadvertently cut my experiment short. In this particular round, I ultimately wasn't feeling resentful of my kids. I was instead experiencing a kind of familiar, floundering fitfulness before my own shortcomings as a parent: why haven't I taught them to take responsibility for their environment?

I've been having a hard time finding the balance of things lately. I'm observing certain places where the fabric is wearing thin, but I'm not sure what to do about it. It seems I should have figured out things like housekeeping and parenting and managing work and the rest of life better by now; the problem is no matter how much experience I accrue, things are always shifting under my feet. 

How is it that I can feel so discouraged? Frances is at Princeton doing beautifully, Gabriel is home this fall working and saving up for his thru hike in the spring, and Beatrice is no longer a little girl who fights me at bedtime. She is twelve years old and knows how to bake an exquisite chocolate chip cookie.

But all the same, I often feel that I am wanting in my ability to captain this ship, and we are teetering on the edge of chaos. I doublebook orthodontist appointments and clients, haircuts and meetings. Empty seltzer cans stand watch over stacks of unread New Yorkers that slide around the surface of the coffee table, while dirty socks are huddled up beneath it. I can't seem to find time to take the stacks of paper recyclables to the place with terrible hours, or call my liability insurance with my questions. The toilet paper holder is broken and I don't know how to fix it. Even my body is chaotic: my shoulder hurts. Or sometimes my knees. My period is totally whack. My god, just think what will happen to us when menopause really gets underway...!

Even though I've parented two twelve year olds before, parenting twelve year old Beatrice is it's own thing. I can only learn to do this from and with her. And I can only parent her as the woman I have become, someone who lives in an older body, has more responsibility at work, and who is more comfortable acknowledging her own need for care, rest, and independent pursuits (like my new private practice and my Thursday night dance rehearsals). When Frances and Gabriel were twelve, I was willing to sacrifice my own well-being. I was taking care of my ill husband, and then I was newly widowed with three young children. Back then I didn't see any other way we were going to survive. 

Now we are forty-eight. I like to see my friends and exercise; also I am navigating screens, middle school dynamics, chores, and schedules with my youngest and more often than not feeling at a loss. 

I've been reading Laurie Colwin (Happy All the Time and More Home Cooking), listening to Samin Nosrat on Fresh Air, and paging through old favorite cookbooks. All of these things fill me with tender longing. I'm building a private practice while working full time (there are good reasons) and the effort and hours this requires is likely related to how freshly appealing cooking has become, ideally with the people I love perched on stools nearby. Gabriel, back from 30 days in the Rockies, has led us on two camping weekends since school began. Cooking in the woods with my family! The gurgle of the little percolator over the fire! Even better. While packing for it is anything but, life becomes marvelously simple on a camping trip. Time unfurls luxuriously.  

On Saturday morning, I was still very much recovering from the over-full week and the hit my house, parenting, and nervous system had taken in response. But last night I cooked a delicious dinner from CSA eggplants and green beans (vegetables that had been stressing me out during the week, looking at me accusingly every time I opened the fridge and threatening to go bad before I had time to cook them), watched a dumb movie snuggled up with Beatrice and Thomas, and slept deeply. Today I went to church, took a long walk in a wooded park with Thomas and Ramona where I had a cry about my various worries, and baked a pumpkin chocolate chip loaf with Beatrice. Gabriel and Beatrice and I did our grateful grace at dinner, and talked about college applications and school projects and whether or not I should buy a pair of silver shoes.

I still don't know how to do this. Widowed parenting is it's own kind of thing, full of rushing love, mind reading, and gut punches - with no breaks. They don't put the spoons away, because I do. There is so much more for me to learn, so many more moments of feeling desperately at a loss ahead. 

I won't know what to do. But we can always sit down to dinner - at the table half covered in homework and laundry, or under a canopy of trees - and bolstered by that ritual well-soaked in faith and love, be reminded that it's okay not to know. We find our way anyhow.

on two incidents of crying in public

I drove Gabriel and my mother through shocking amounts of traffic to the Atlanta airport on Wednesday afternoon, arriving with less padding time-wise than we'd anticipated. It took us nearly three hours to get there from the peaceful mountaintop in Western North Carolina where Gabriel had spent the previous six weeks. The most stimulation he encountered there came in the forms of cacophonous birdsong, campers shout-singing during Morning Circle, thunderstorms, and Sunday texting on his grayscaled iphone10.  

We walked from the short term parking lot to the ticketing area for United. I watched his wide eyes set in his alert, expressionless face scanning the vast space filled with hundreds of other faces and the accompanying sound of hundreds of wheeled suitcases bumping along the tiled floor, trying to make sense of it all. 

We checked his duffle. We'd spent the morning packing all his gear, checking off items one at a time from a five page long list. I watched his tricep muscles tighten as he leaned over the desk to fill out an identification tag and wondered. 

And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful boy.

And yet. There we were. 

My mom opted to wait for us, safe in an eddy outside the women's room while we entered the rushing current of people barreling towards the TSA line.

We did not speak. I could see his mind calculating the length of the line, the amount of time needed to get to his gate, whether he'd need to take one of those trains through the airport terminals as our feet moved one after another beneath us, propelling us towards our parting.  

And then we hugged goodbye. His body was tensed to face the challenges ahead. I told him I loved him and watched him walk briskly off, into the line, into the next 30 days.

I exhaled. I stood very still after he'd left my sight, and I cried. 

An airport worker walked by, then slowed to look back over her left shoulder at me. She wore large cat's eye glasses with translucent blue frames and perfect pink lipstick. She said, are you alright honey?

Yes, I nodded pathetically, still crying. I'm okay.

She turned on her heel and walked right back towards me. 

There's no crying in my airport! she said as she opened her arms and pulled me into a full embrace. 

I collapsed into her. He'll be fine, I sobbed. I felt I had to both explain my behavior and indicate that I was still rational, but she could've cared less. She released me with some more clucking maternal noises and went off to do her job. I felt loved by this stranger, and that made me cry more. 

Soon after my mom and I made our way back into the brutal summer Atlanta traffic, we learned his flight to Denver was delayed. And delayed again. And finally delayed so much that he wouldn't be able to catch his connecting flight to Wyoming, which was one of only two flights to Riverton, Wyoming each day, and so I began a series of phone calls to reschedule his travel and coordinate with his NOLS program and arrange a stay with our friends in Boulder that night. 

After many hours of this during our drive north, including an extended conversation with an incredibly nice woman named Marlene who runs Gator Creek Taxi in Riverton, in the end Gabriel managed to make his flight and land in Wyoming a little before 2 am EST. He didn't have his bag, but he didn't care. He made it! And somehow his canceled shuttle was miraculously waiting and brought him to Lander. And so his NOLS adventure began.

I don't know what to make of all the ways I have been feeling ever since Gabriel sat me down in the dining hall at camp one year ago to tell me his plan: graduating high school a year early and taking a gap year to hike the Appalachian Trail before he went to college. I had arrived early to volunteer at camp before driving him and Beatrice home and I had not expected him to tell me that. I mostly just listened, impressed by his resolve, disoriented by the idea of losing out on an entire year of him at home.

We got home and he set about making it happen. He changed his schedule and status from junior to senior. He deepened his connections with a cohort of senior friends. We went on college visits. He went to prom and graduation and senior week. He applied to be a CIT this summer at camp.

I was the one that suggested this NOLS course. I knew it would be stressful getting him directly from camp to Wyoming. I knew the gear list would make my head hurt. I knew we'd miss him like crazy for 30 days with no contact at all after six weeks in North Carolina. But I also suspected it would be the kind of formative experience that stays with a person forever. And I knew I'd be a lot less nervous about the months of thru hiking with his good friend that lay ahead.

Now he's been out in the field for five days. On his third day in the Rockies, I went with Beatrice and Thomas and his daughter Junah to see our longtime favorites, Ballet X, perform their summer series in Philadelphia. I especially wanted to see a piece called The Last Glass, set to music by Beirut, of which I knew little besides it was a company favorite and featured joyful, expressive movement.

The piece is organized around couples who come together in community as a whole, but also perform a series of pas de deux that each tell a story. Every dancer has a distinct character. And while there are a variety of compelling interpersonal challenges expressed in their dances, the character who struck me most deeply - the quiet persistent center of the whole piece - was the one whose challenge stems from the fact that her partner is dead. At least that was my interpretation. She wanders the stage alone sometimes, curled in on herself in pain, looking for something that we can't see. And sometimes she dances with a man dressed all in white who continually slips through her fingers just when she seems to be relaxing into his presence. His face eludes her hands; his body slides along the floor into the wings as she helplessly watches him go. A cruel trick. The other couples danced around her.

It made me cry.

Her physicality sent me back to the weeks and months after Mike died, when my body hurt all the time. It was like taking punches to the gut over and over. Curling in on oneself, barely breathing. How memories comfort until the floor suddenly opens beneath you in the brute pain of absence (there's that cruel trick). I didn't think about those excruciating days sitting in the audience and on the walk back to the car; I rather breathlessly watched the dancers while a part of me felt that deep embodied grief. 

(Beatrice, later: isn't it amazing that a dance can bring up so much emotion?)

(And there is something there too, about how I didn't want therapy and talking then so much as tending to my hurting body. I needed hands on my skin, breath in my lungs. And how now, I dance.)

After all the tears, I thought about my completely unexpected response to that dance. My mom and I had a lot of time together driving to pick up Gabriel and take him to the airport; some of our conversations centered around my kids. How they are growing up. How we made it through some terrible times together.

On one of the rare searing moments when Mike and I acknowledged that he might die of his relentless disease and leave me a widow and the children fatherless, I had a bright flash of knowing run through me. We'll be okay, I told him. I will live for them. Then we cried together.

It was true. Especially in the beginning. I lived for them. 

They kept me getting up in the morning and making breakfasts and packing lunches and going to work. All I wanted was to give them respite from the pain of illness and death; I wanted to give them normal life, to cover up all the glaring not-normalness of where we found ourselves. 

We have all healed and grown so much since then. But for a very long time they were the anchors I clung to for dear life. They have been a cover when I couldn't bear to be responsible for myself. At times I have hidden away behind their sparkling presences; it takes real intention and effort to allow my own priorities to be important, even now, when they encourage me to. 

And now they are leaving. Our unit exists intact in our hearts and minds; not so much on the earth where we are rarely all in the same place. Frances is in Buenos Aires, Gabriel is in Wyoming, Beatrice is on an overnight trip with a friend and her family. I am sitting in a Starbucks outside Philadelphia.

That dancer also tapped my grief over my boy's departure; over the way my children rooted me in the life that I built for them from our old rubble, only to grow up and leave it. 

They are becoming healthy, independent, adventuresome, brilliant, funny young adults - just the way a mother might hope they would. It's ideal; it's shocking. How could they? 

I am grateful to them for helping me survive the most crushing loss imaginable. And - yes, it's true! - also grateful to them for growing up, and without their needs to hide behind, forcing me into another no-net style chapter of growth and discovering in ever deeper ways what I feel, what I want, who I will become.

Gabriel, I can't believe you left a year early. Gabriel, my heart sings for you, and for all of us. 

marking the occasion

I was walking down the central thoroughfare in the grocery store today after work, and slowed my pace to peer down an aisle, trying to remember if we needed canned beans. There I spied a narrow back belonging to a fair-headed man in a t shirt and black jeans. He was leaning over his cart, elbows resting on the handle as he made some similar domestic calculation. I saw him fleetingly, less than a second as I walked by, but the hunch of his shoulders was so like Mike. Something about the frame, the posture. What a gut punch. A gut-and-heart punch. I pulled over in the next aisle and looked at the teas, breathing, waiting for the tears tightening my throat to relax and sink back down to their usual quiet depths. Mike. You surprised me.

Tomorrow will mark fifty years since he was born. 

And it will mark fifty years since my boyfriend Thomas was born.

It will mark forty-nine years since my glamorous twenty-five year old parents were married in Pittsburgh, and 104 years since my grandfather was born in Texas, the only child of Roy and Fay Howell, who were forty and thirty-nine years old at the time. (How long did they struggle with infertility? Were there miscarriages? How unlikely was his birth?)

I saw on Instagram yesterday that May 23rd is a favorite barre and dance teacher's birthday too. Is she also part of the mysterious cosmic conspiracy revolving around tomorrow's date, to which I may well owe the most important parts of me, the most important of all being my very existence? Probably! 

In six days I will take Frances to the Philadelphia airport to fly to Buenos Aires for a summer internship. In seven days I will file into our town's minor league baseball stadium to cheer on seven hundred McCaskey High School graduates, and my shining son Gabriel will be among them. A few days after that I will help him pack many disparate items off an extensive packing list that I cannot seem to contend with yet and cram them into our little EV, and drive him to the Smoky Mountains for 6 weeks of being a CIT followed directly by a month of adventuring in Wyoming. 

And tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Beatrice from four days on the Chesapeake Bay with her fellow sixth graders, just in time to take a rhubarb upside down cake to the cemetery where we can cry and laugh in that sacred place that brings us a hair's breath closer to Mike than we are in regular life. Then on Saturday we'll go to Philadelphia to celebrate Thomas's half century on this planet in style. He will be fifty years old, and that is very, very good. I smile typing it.  

I have zero answers in response to the open question that is tomorrow. How can Mike and Thomas have the exact same birthday?* How can a person grieve and celebrate all at once? How can I find the vast space I need inside to hold it all? 

And more than that, how I can live these impossibilities while I continue to go through the many motions required to help my two oldest children set out for distant shores and become ever more independent of the nest I have poured my heart into for the past twenty years? This nest barely resembles that one I first feathered with Mike. It's full of lanky teenage boys' laughter, skin care products, a lunatic barking dog, opinions about protein intake, episodes of The Americans, internet-fueled slang I cannot keep up with, cat hair, smelly running shoes, expensive ice cream, and interruption-peppered conversations about politics and school and relationships and history and AI and media and books and other people and feelings. These days, the only thing I'm allowed to read out loud to them is the Vows section of the Sunday Times (thanks Beatrice). 

Nonetheless this nest, such as it is, holds our shared memories of being a family of five. The exquisite heaviness of all the change hits me hard sometimes. It's my forever problem - one more impossible space to live inside of - I love to see them grow, and I love them just exactly the way they are right now. 

So, right. No answers. Only love-as-grief, love-as-tenderness, love-as-unease, love-as-bafflement. 

In other words a heart, full to the brim.

*Astrologists, I welcome your thoughts.