#SOL16: A Snowy Day in Vermont

Zen (M.A. Reilly)

Lovers don't suddenly meet somewhere. They're inside  one another all along.  

                                                                                - Rumi

I.

from my art journal

26 years ago Rob and I were married in Vermont by a man named Dave. It was a brief civil ceremony that took place in the front parlor of Dave's home with his wife witnessing the marriage. That morning it snowed and would continue to do so for most of the day. Later we would find an abandoned road, unplowed. We left the jeep on the side as best we could and spent an hour playing in the deep snow. It seemed as if the whole world was kindly waiting beyond the borders of our day and only Rob and me existed in that late afternoon. I learned there to never get into a snowball fight with a guy from Brooklyn.

You gotta pack the snow. Pack it,  my husband of just a few hours advised as he lobbed snowball after snowball at me.

It was a day only the two of us would know.  It is these private moments that frame what a marriage rests upon.


II.

Rob and Max at home

Half of my life was spent with Rob. And though I have memories of times before Rob, they mostly pale and are more fragmented than whole. I learned through Rob how to be vulnerable; how to love and be loved. We spent 11 years together before adopting Devon and then another 17 years as a family with our son. And now Devon and I have spent this last year learning how to step back into the world and live.

I've been thinking about what made all those years feel so full and at first I began to note travels we had taken for we traveled often. But that's not it.  For what emerged were not scenes of Tuscany or the west of Ireland as lovely as each was, but rather ordinary days at home. Days not unlike today where clouds have rolled in and the air has turned bitter cold again. And when winter asserts itself the contrast between it and home is so grand. Inside, our home is warm--a place made for making art, for conjuring dreams, for becoming. Home has always been such a safe and lovely local place. It is here I learned the art of error.


III.

Rob in intensive care, reading.

This morning wanting to connect with Rob, I read some of his last journal entries. I felt compelled to know what he was thinking in those weeks before he stopped writing completely. I had not been able to read these before as such a connection would have been too painful after his death. This morning though I felt differently and found his last notebook on a shelf in our bedroom. I had kept it close. Curled up in bed early this morning, I read as if some secret messages might be revealed.

There were no secrets, save one. Rather, my husband, part jester, mostly stunning intellect could be read in the things he noted and pondered. I had forgotten that throughout most of January he continued to read  The New York Times and The Nation. He continued to read Walter Benjamin. He was working on a poem about a child caught between the repeating image of self in multiple mirrors. These were a set of mirrors that had been in his childhood home. He noted that he continued to be disappointed, even then in the weeks leading to his death, in his mother who could not commit to knit him a hat he could wear during the anticipated chemotherapy--a therapy he would not live to see.

Towards the end of the entries he asked if he was losing his mind. It was late January and what he could not know then but what his body seemed to be telling him was what we would learn 48 hours later. He was at the Kessler rehab and again at the hands of his doctors and nurses, he would contract another staph infection and this time he would not recover. As the infection rooted within him, his tether to reality loosened and the fever and shakes increased.

He was so lost and so alone.

For the 100 days Rob spent in hospitals during the 5 months of his illness I spent most every day with him--save only a few days. I had breakfast with Rob on that Friday morning before the only major snowfall we would have last winter. More than 2 feet of snow fell and I would not see him again until Sunday night when he was transported to Morristown Hospital where he would remain until mid-February. It would be my insistent phone calls to the nurses that would finally prompt the care Rob needed and the doctor's decision to transport Rob to the hospital. I knew something was wrong as he was so lethargic on the phone, in such a hurry to hang up. This was not like him and I was scared and frustrated that I could not be there and needed to rely on others.


IV.

Watching (M.A. Reilly)

A year ago Rob promised me that this year we would go away on holiday to celebrate our anniversary. We had planned to do so for our 25th anniversary and we could not. It was a promise made with only the best intention and it was a promise that could not be met.

What makes for a full and satisfying marriage, is less about destination and duration and more about the contentment felt when standing still. I could not see Rob's death then when we began together so many years ago. I could not see his end as I cannot see tomorrow. It is the living we do between now and then that defines who we are and who we want to be.

On that abandoned road deep with snow,  I knew I would love this man forever.

#SOL 16: The Unbanked River

House By the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

                                   Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

I.

It isn't only the absence that makes the holidays so difficult. It's how memories free flow like a river unbanked. Earlier my son rushed in to tell me he was testing the speed of a new router. Armed with an iPad he plopped down on the sofa and I took a second to study him in that unguarded moment. And as I looked, I glimpsed the toddler who approached most days with a similar curiosity.

Daddy? 

Umm. 

I fixed the wall good. 

What wall?    

The one by the steps. I fix it.  

Okay, good.                   

We  had just moved into a newly built home and as we got setttled that first night Devon was nonstop chatter about fixing a wall. We were so tired and excited and we told him how good that was that he fixed the wall and he smiled with a pride I can still recall. After we had put him to sleep, Rob would discover that our then three-year-old had used green and yellow markers to draw all over the stairwell wall. Those were Devon's Bob the Builder days and he was always fixing something. Even now 14 years later, there is a faint staining that remains.

Subtle.
Heart wrenching.

We always meant to repaint, but never found time or money to do so. And now, well now, those slight stains are reminders. What remains is of course of greater interest after a loved one has passed. How different might our lives have been had we known the little time Rob would have here on earth--would have with our son? Better, I imagine to not know such things.


II.

These days I rewrite so many private memories with the new knowledge of how much time Rob had left. 13 years after Devon fixed the wall, 13 years almost to the day, I would answer the house phone early one morning and then pass it to Rob who would learn he had cancer. Nothing would ever be the same again. And yet, nothing ever is.

There is a clarity that sorrow births that reshapes meaning. It's like at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town when Emily returns from the dead to glimpse a lived day.

I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back...up the    hill...to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.          

Looks left and then out past audience and then to the right 

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good- by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 

And it is this knowledge of the present where we stand and so often look beyond that cuts us. We feel that sharp edge of that understanding borne from failing to notice. It is the seemingly unimportant and ordinary moments of living that best define us--that we miss the most. And when we realize that we have failed to love these moments as we lived, we share Emily's regrets. We share her pain until we forget again.

And we will forget.


III.

Life rushes on and our losses that feel so profound are hardly specks in the cosmos.  I marvel these days at the fierce pulsing of life. A river unbanked.


IV. 

The Stage Manager closes the Wilder's play by noting:

There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk...or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

And perhaps it is this straining that disrupts the sweet ebb and flow of the river. Perhaps it is this straining that reveals the mindlessness that lulls us to forget the necessary unbanking a river will claim, must claim. 

Memory is so fleeting and we forget the rush and spill of water beyond the pathways we have made. We forget how this alters the shape and look of the landscape we carry within.

The river finds what is has always been regardless of the many banks we have built to tame it.


V.

Grief gives us a new geography and a new lexicon of utterances and sighs that allow us to see and hear differently. The unbanked river transforms the familiar. There we hardly know the water--the once steady ebb and flow is now difficult to discern. We have waded far and buoyed by constraints and by absences, we feel a new meter beating through us, rising up. We will give it its way as we must.

When I look back, when I recall the nearly-30 years with Rob, what I see mostly is that we loved fearlessly. 

#SOL16: What Grief Teaches

Rob in ICU last New Year's day. He would die two months later.

Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are. 

                                                 -José Ortega y Gasset

I.

In  the years I taught writing I did not know that it would save my life. I never imagined. I wish I could go back to those many students I taught and say, Listen carefully. Writing might save your life one day. Forget the assignments. Throw away the how-to books. Skip the tests. Write because you have something tugging at your sleeve and you cannot name it. Not yet.

But perhaps I overstate. My love for hyperbole has gotten the best of me. Writing never saved me.

Wrong verb.

Let me try again.


II.

What I did not know as my husband was dying was that writing would be a conduit for opening possibilities. In times of sickness and stress, space collapses. Orientation becomes confused. Last year we lived more like Edwin Abbott's Flatlanders. We were lost in this 3-dimensional world. In those dark days, light could not find us. It could not move up or down, for there was neither. We were more acted upon than acting.

Then, writing helped to reshape, rename, and illuminate the moment where I stood--showing me the top of my own two feet planted on terra firma. Giving me dimension. At first it was the compulsion to name what was happening as my husband's illness, hospital stays, and compounding medical issues gathered weight. Against the myriad of changes, writing helped me to say what I was often too frightened to hear. A lot of this writing I kept private as I did not want to share doubts with Rob. Hope is such a fragile thing. But as his illness grew graver and his touch with reality loosened, I began to record thoughts and share them here on this blog.

I so needed you and you heard me.

You listened when my own husband was too far removed from reality to bear witness. Rob was preparing himself for his own death. He was tinkering at an edge I could not see or visit. The distance between life and death begins well before the last breath is made. As he would later tell me, just a couple of days before his death, "I have figured out how to cross over."

And he did. 

Even now there are moments when his leaving, his death, catches me by surprise. 


III.

As winter edged into spring last year, I wrote because I could see no future. None. I had more energy than sense. Saying the impossible helped to rid my body of pain. In those days, I was more pain than flesh. I wrote to name what was just outside the reach of my fingers. Throughout the spring and summer I was unable to generate a single daydream of a possible life for myself. It was as if I was trapped inside a TV network that had signed off for the night. Instead of a random show playing, there was only a test pattern.

A holding pattern. 

Regularly scheduled life would resume sometime. Later.

I wrote to shatter that screen.


IV.

By fall I could imagine.  Perhaps the many months of painting and drawing and writing helped give shape to darkness. Perhaps the act of making, lit up the corners and bid me to be courageous enough to be present.  

And now with winter upon us I am coming almost full circle. 

The nights in late December are deeper and the wind more biting than I recall from a year ago. It is bracing. Lively. 

When a love dies, innocence dies too. I still write most days. I make marks with paint and pen, pencil, too. And I have learned that this pain I have named is not unique. Grief finds expression in our lives, as does joy and all that comes between. 

V. 

There is no future--just what we imagine and hold up, now and then as truths. And sometimes these truths become embodied. Each day there is a life to make. Each breath says, I am becoming. Like these digital marks I lay down with the press of my fingers, life is more about what we make and less about what gets made. This is what Rob's death has helped me to learn. I am what I make, what I do. 

Years ago, Thomas Merton explained that "[s]olitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it." 

VI. 

Mostly I write to deepen the present. I chose to live deeply, intentionally. Even at my saddest, I knew that running would ill serve me. 

Stand in the pain. Be the pain. Name it. 

On that cold February morning when we learned Rob was dying, he commanded me to not hide myself away. A year later, I am like Thoreau's understudy and I know Rob would approve. This year, I too went to the woods to live deliberately. I thought grief was the absence of a future. What I could not know then as I do now is that what we hold in our own hands is what is most essential--not for what it is and isn't, but rather because we claim it.

I am responsible for this life I am making.  

VII.

I wonder how it was possible that a mere hour after learning he would die in the matter of days, Rob knew the exact words I would most need to hear. Live brilliantly, he told me. For months these words shifted, took on new meaning as I emerged from the hold of grief. Now, I understand that living brilliantly is what I have been holding in the palm of my hand. 

To write is to savor the here--the now--to embrace the responsibility for your life. 

#SOL16: A Gift

from my art journal  (Nov., 2016)

Out here in the perimeter there are no stars              

                                                 - The Doors

I.

About three days before Rob died, he no longer was very present in what had been our life. He would resurface one time during those last days when friends came to visit, but he was no longer connected to me. I realize that now.

As he edged closer to death, he did so alone.

He spent his last 20 days preparing himself for his death. It was solitary in so many ways and I--at best--was privy to only a small part of that process.  We all enter and leave alone.

II.

Even now, months later, I still feel the sudden sick drop of my stomach when I think of Rob's last minutes alive.  I know that I held his right hand between both of mine and I think I spoke with him. More than likely I kept repeating something reassuring. Perhaps I told him how loved he was. How it was okay to let go and find peace.  Honestly, I cannot recall what words I spoke or if I spoke any words aloud or not. All the while, Devon sat on the other side of the bed, his father's left hand tucked between his two hands.  Beyond us were others: Jane and Robyn, my brother, Brendan. Perhaps others as well I can't recall.  I know that no one but Rob and Devon were in my field of sight.

What memory remains with a cutting clarity is how my son would not let go of his father's hand for nearly thirty minutes after Rob died. He just laid against his father's body and cried. Our son had just turned 17 a month earlier. I recall as I gathered all the medical supplies that were throughout the main floor of our home that I was worrying about how I might help Devon be able to leave his father's body.  I said nothing and found patience and Devon eased himself from what had been his dad.  We talked quietly about how quickly Rob was gone from the room, leaving behind the body that had been his for so long, but no more.

III.

When the man you love dies in front of you, the body you have know so long, so intimately reveals itself at death to be not the man at all. The man is gone even though the body remains. And so quickly that body begins to collapse in on itself--loosened jaw, sunken cheeks. It seems to disassemble before your eyes. Who knew the spirit was the source of life?

IV.

To care for my husband, the father of our child, and bear witness to his much too early death is to have the trajectory of my life altered. I will never be the same as I was before that morning when we received a phone call telling us that Rob had cancer.  In the space of 30 weeks my husband went from walking around seemingly fine to dead.

Carpe diem is no longer a catchy phrase, but rather an imperative I live with. Friends, we have now.


V.

Last week I reread some of what I had written on this blog during Rob's last three days of life. It was the first time I did so. Reading these few posts left me in tears. I had little to no memory of having written any of it and yet even though I was sad beyond description, I was also grateful that I have a record of those days--a record that is raw and honest and necessary.

To be able to to write and to have chosen to do so is more gift than I ever expected.

#SOL16: 60 Triggers

Coming Undone  (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

The holidays brings so many memories of Rob, triggered by a list that doesn't seem to end. Even though each hurts at the surprising moment of encounter, the memories that linger are also soothing. Here's 60 -- one for every year Rob lived.

1. an ad for a Tibetan singing bowl
2. reading the Sunday Times and not having you to read to me
3. finding in my wallet an old comic Rob gave me 
4. using a hand warmer--knowing you introduced me to them
5. the triangular box for an ornament that came in the mail
6. everything in the attic I can't bear to bring down stairs for Christmas
7. finding the menorah that Dev and Rob lit when Dev was a young child
8. a man changing a flat tire on the side of the road
9. finding the last message Rob left me on my phone
10. latest issue of The Nation that arrived via the mail that still is addressed to Rob
11. a solicitation call from the ACLU
12. the spill of weak winter light through the back window 
13. a radio ad announcing immunotherapy 
14. an email from one of Rob's former students
15. a photo from Loch Ness I found in a  drawer
16. raking leaves
17. a song on the radio
18. the smell of pine from the Christmas tree
19. any navy blue Pacifica I pass on the road
20. a container of miso soup
21. a sign for Brooklyn Tech
22. Mo Anam Cara
23. the notes Rob was working on that are still on his desktop 
24. overhearing someone mention Grange (in Ireland)
25. when I see someone writing with a fountain pen 
26. At Bed Bath and Beyond seeing a new wooden back brush like the one I bought for Rob every year
27. thinking about lineage makes me think of the morning Rob and I spent at the Joyce House in Dublin
28. realizing that an entire football season has happened and I only recently heard mention of the Giants
29. every time I pull my car into the garage and Rob's car is no longer there
30. June 16, 1904
31. a jar with loose tea leaves
32. West Rutland, VT
33. seeing a print from that art studio on the Isle of Sky
34. seeing wine from Montepulciano on a menu
35. finding Rob's now expired passport in the dresser
36. the photo of the man I took on Grafton Street in Dublin and realizing now that Rob would live only 8 years after I took it
37. the roll of a chair on the wooden floor above
38. winter sunsets
39. planning Christmas dinner this year
40. selecting gifts for Dev and not having you here to discuss what to buy and make for our son
41. the smell of snow
42. a man with a small braid in his hair
43. holiday shopping in Warwick, NY
44. a flannel shirt left on the sofa
45. the mention of finger painting
46. seeing the New York Times on a wooden table
47. finding an independent bookshop and realizing that Rob isn't here for me to buy a gift
48. the sound of an espresso machine
49. every time I pass a place I photographed 
50. loose change
51. the basket Rob always kept in the back of his car
52. overhearing someone mention the Serenity Prayer
53. the smell of a fire when I am out walking
54. not signing Rob's name on the Christmas tags for Devon's gifts 
55. seeing someone wearing a Black Dog Cafe t-shirt
56. the first snowfall 
57. preparing for a workshop and not having Rob to bounce off ideas
58. realizing the 28th of this month will come and there is no anniversary now to celebrate
59. putting on the heat for the car seat
60. every lone cardinal 

#SOL16: Encapsulated

Dreams Big Dreams (M.A. Reilly, October 2016)

I.

I equated Rob's death as the single source of my grief--as if grief might be encapsulated. For months I believed this to be a truth. I grieved because Rob died. Throughout this time, I moved in and out of denial about his death. It isn't that I thought he had not died, but rather I experienced what Joan Didion calls magical thinking. If I was good enough, kind enough, patient enough--our life would return to what it had been. Life as I knew it would be restored. I only needed to hold my breath and wait and then the miraculous would happen. Just wait and see. It's not as if I told myself this using words. Rather it was a bone deep knowing and regardless of how true it felt, it was false.

II.

Some mornings when I came downstairs and it was late spring or early summer and the light was falling so lovely through all the front windows, it felt as if I could step back into that world I knew so well like one might step from a platform onto a stopped train before being swept away. I expected that as I turned to go into the kitchen, I would find Rob seated at the table with his coffee cup at hand.

The emptiness of the chair--a chair he never sat in--was so acute. My memories of our shared everyday ordinariness are so visceral, so familiar.

III.

Those weeks right before his death, I craved the familiar as I stood in a landscape I hardly could name. Everything felt unfamiliar, changed, uneven, out of control. The hospital bed in the family room. The drone and click of the oxygen machine. The constant stream of people in and out of our home. Adult diapers. All I had to remember. The white liquid is Morphine. The pink liquid is Lorazepam. Fill the syringe with the green drug, haloperidol, if there is a psychotic incident.

One morning I realized that my husband could no longer say my name. He knew me, but his capacity to say my name was now gone. Every day something left us. Every day he inched towards death. I would learn later that at times of pain or fright, he would spontaneously call for me. He would yell, and only yell my name. In the middle all of this, there were lucid moments where I would glimpse my Rob again. But mostly he was not of this world those last three weeks of life.

IV.

In the weeks following his death, little made sense except the need to walk. I walked morning and late afternoon. I walked to try to distance myself from the awful, awful truth that my husband was dead. I walked because I could not sit still. I walked because Rob lost the capacity to walk. I walked because it reminded me that I was still living. I walked because I needed to commune with nature and I must have understood that it would be nature that would begin the healing. I walked to make a new ritual. I walked to see the cardinal darting in and out of the trees. I walked because it spent energy.

#SOL16: Coming Home

Woods (M.A. Reilly, 2013, Ringwood, NJ)

Woods II (M.A. Reilly, 2013, Ringwood, NJ)

                                                                    ...If what a tree or a bush does is lost on you,
                                                                    You are surely lost. Stand still. The forest knows
                                                                    Where you are. You must let it find you.

                                                                              - David Wagoner, Lost (from here).

I.

Grief is less like a terrible thing that has happened and more like an unlocked room we can't seem to leave, until we do.
Grief is a reoccurring conversation we stumble into and out of across the distances that have formed in our heads.

II.

Grief is always present tense.

III.

Some days, when grace fails to find purchase among the raw remembrances that have grown bodies and wings, our first instinct will be to build a wall between us and our memories.

But don't.

Memory is liquid.
It seeps beneath time and intention and (sometimes) greets us with its sweetness.

IV.

Grief is more skin than cloth.
A sparse comfort we gather round us as seasons slip by.

And though this pain is caustic as it is beautiful--what smarts the most is how understanding does not right our world, regardless of how hard we wish it so.

V.

Grief forms us. It pulses, confirming our breath, our beating heart.

Pádraig Ó Tuama warns, "Don't let the terrible narrative be the thing that holds you...You may find your home in the very place you thought you'd have to leave."

VI.

Tell all the heart.
We are courageous.
We are staying.

Tell it now when we are most scared.

Say it with intention.

Say it here
                  among those
                  who stand so very still
                                                        knowing home will find us whole.

#SOL16: A Portrait

 And Still the Birds Came (M.A. Reilly, Leonia, NJ, 2012)

I.

Some memories steal upon us and feel embodied. This is no different and I wonder if I might have conjured my dead husband from a spell I have known by heart. Here in the still dark morning he has dimension, a scent I have tasted, have worn on my skin. Did I form him from the deep ache in my side--bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh?

No, he is not rib. More likely I have spun him from his own ashes, like the stardust God conjured Adam. And this sighting sends me back through the years to an ordinary afternoon where we each fit side by side.

II.

As I  enter through the front door, I see he is seated at the round table at the back of the house in our kitchen. He glances up, the newspaper spread before him, the off white mug with the image of a black lab sitting to his right. And I know without any testing that the coffee in the mug will be hours cold. The day has surely been foggy and I have been out walking through fields and woods for hours and have returned with the camera bag slung over my shoulder.

"You're back," he'll say. 

And I close the door, leaving the bag in the hallway and start towards him. The damp chill that has clung to the oversized sweatshirt--his Maine sweatshirt--unfurls like a banner, like a flag as I pull the sweatshirt over my head and drop it on a chair. Here it is warm even though the day beyond is not.

And I want to unwind this moment, to savor the very sight of him: the way his lips part as he grins, the way he looks at me over the rim of his glasses that rest on the bridge of his nose, the way his hair, that never grayed, is pulled back and tied with a leather strip. And I wonder now, was he always so pleased to see me home?

"So, did you get some good shots?" he'll ask.

"I think I got a couple of good ones," I'll say, rounding the table so I can lean down to kiss his perfect upturned mouth.

III.

This was us.

Just this.
Just.

#SOL16: A Link in the Chain

from my art journal - Two Women, 2016

I.

It's the things you never needed, nor wanted to notice, that cut so deeply. Like this morning in Starbucks. I was waiting for a cup of mint tea when I overheard the barista say to a customer, "Boy am I tired. By the time my husband and I got home..."

Now, it wasn't her words. I stopped hearing her immediately. I couldn't tell you what she or the man she was speaking with said next.  No, it's not the words. Rather, it's the tone. Yes, the tone. The tone was too dear, too familiar. The intonation carried far more meaning than the words, tugged at a memory that didn't quite take shape.  I got the tea and then left.

Later, driving home from work I felt blind anger rising up, swarming about me. Nothing happened, I thought. Why am I feeling this? No reason surfaced.

It would be hours later when I remembered the woman and the sound of respect and love that was communicated when she uttered, my husband.  I knew the sound those words signified: love and respect. All of that and more was conveyed when she simply said, my husband.

And at that moment, she embodied all I had lost.


II.

Every utterance, Mikhail Bakhtin (1986) tells us is a "link in the chain of speech communion" (p. 76). I was thinking of this as I walked at dusk. It had been a two-walk day. I was out of sorts, unanchored. In accepting Rob's death, the sadness shifted a bit revealing more of myself draped in all of this sorrow. It hurts to see the darkness surrounding me.

While walkings, I was listening to On Being--an older interview by Pico Iyer of Krista Tippett. She  was speaking about her recent book about wisdom. She said,

...then there is also this paradox that we are so often made by what would break us. And I think this is where our spiritual traditions, where spiritual life is so redemptive and necessary, because this is the place in life that says — that honors the fact that there’s darkness — but also says “And you can find meaning right there,” right? Not — it’s not overcoming it. It’s not beyond it. It’s not in spite of it. What goes wrong doesn’t have to define us but, I mean, again, to come back to what wisdom is, as I’ve seen it, it’s people who walk through whatever darkness, whatever hardship, whatever imperfection and unexpected catastrophes or the like, the huge and the ordinary losses of any life, who walk through those and integrate them into wholeness on the other side. That you’re whole and healed, not fixed. Not in spite of those things, but because of how you have let them be part of you.

Mine is an ordinary loss, typical really. And it is the ordinary happenings--the losses and joys and sadnesses and confusions that link us. Our talk of these to one another bind us, helps us perhaps to honor the darkness that (in)forms such loss. Bakhtin writes, "Each utterance is filled with echoes and reverberations of other utterances to which it is related by the communality of the sphere of speech communication" (p. 96).  The woman behind the counter at Starbucks is a repository for the preceding voices, the dwelling place of memories where my husband resides.

What gets forged each day as I make my way is a kind of strength that knows surrender at its heart. The anger I feel stems, in part, from understanding that medical errors that could have been avoided but were not left Rob unable to climb two stairs, unable to reason, unable to know what was real and what was fantasy, unable to be the partner I had known or the consistent father to our son. It left him not able to write the letter he told me he wanted to write to Devon. And though we had five months left from the diagnosis, the sadder truth is that we had barely a week for once the first staph infection ravaged his body his decline was mostly vertical.

There's a darkness to all of this. And yes, I am angry that the carelessness of one doctor and the poor judgment of a second stole the little time Rob, Dev and I had; stole my husband's slim chance to live.

Tonight the moon is a waxing crescent and beneath it I am wondering what I am becoming. Here in this dark place, light breaks like hope.


Cited:

Bakhtin, Mikhail.  (1986). "The Problem of Speech Genres." Speech Genres, and Other Late Essays. Trans. Vern W. McGee. Ed. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin: University of Texas Press.

#SOL16: Samhain's Fire

Samhain's Fire (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

It's like testing the heat of water with an elbow.  Inch it into and out of a memory and see what heat rises, what exactly can be tolerated. And then, only then, place one foot following the next, edging, edgy until submerged in what has been.

Widows test memory, wait and see what scalds, what soothes, what passes unnoticed.


II.

With acceptance comes a manageable sorrow and a weighed sadness that is a whole body experience. Even my toes know its stink. Some days, I am full of it. And yet others, I can't remember its name.


III.

Originally, the old English word, sæd, meant having one's fill with food--feeling satiated. Across the years the meaning changed and yet the sense of heaviness remained. And it is that heaviness that weighs me, sends me out walking miles and miles each day.

Who knew grief could be tempered by a body in motion?


IV.

I am careful not to take too much of a backward glance to those closing days and hours when Rob was crossing from here to there. I think of this as we have just passed Samhain--when the veil between here and there is at its thinnest. If I knew a spell I would have spoke it aloud these last few nights, called up my husband to tell him how I was watching over our boy, keeping him steeped in love.

But I know no spells. Just these words.

#SOL16: Portal

Rob in Ireland. 

I.

In Marie Howe's poem, Gate, she opens by writing:

"I had no idea that the gate I would step through  

to finally enter this world 

would be the space my brother's body made."

I tasted the sounds those perfect words made in my mouth--felt the immediacy that living demands. Like Howe who suffered the loss of her brother, I too know certain grief, and what such loss prompts the battered soul to do. For loss is both a gate that opens us to this moment, to the here and a burden we shoulder through the days.

Howe teaches us that we have only the present moment.


II.

The space my husband's body made as his soul soared and his life here bowed was more a passageway than an end. I did not know that at the moment.  But it was a gate to walk through and now, months later I am here, in a place I might not have come to without his death.

This is a space made by love--made by loss.


III.

What has taken shape before me is a new place of competence and uncertainty, of limits and possibilities. Across the last 15 months, I have grappled with choosing to live, not merely exist.

Who am I without him?
Who have I been?
Who won't I be?

I am no longer wife.
I am no longer RobandMaryann.
I am undefined from the ways I have known and yet, I am oddly hopeful.


IV.

What becomes possible after deep love and loss are newer ways of being in the world. Newer ways of coming to name what is essential and what is merely interesting.

I promise you--whatever it is you fear the most will announce itself after the death of your most beloved. Whatever you most fear will come knocking at that open gate seeking entrance. And understand this, you will be the better for it, if you bid it welcome. This is a time when courage has your name written all over it.

Let it in.


V.

There are gates--portals before us and to seek them requires sacrifice.  To walk through such gates is to know immense loss and promise; to know each and still feel your breath against the back of your hand.

#SOL16: Turn on the Light

The Lightbulb (M.A. Reilly: paper collage, handmade papers, found papers, digital remix, 2016)

I.

Imagine a very long chain suspended from a ceiling fixture. Get that imagine fixed in your mind. Now, look up and see that the fixture has no globe.  It had been lost along the way. Or perhaps it broke one afternoon. These details matter, but not today.

There's just a single bulb.

To turn the light on, to illuminate the room you know too well and night beyond the windows, you must reach up and tug the chain. Tug it hard.


 II.

About 9 days ago I began to wonder about what remains after the initial shock of grief passes. I realized then that I had stopped crying daily. I could think of Rob and not cry. I had just stopped and in the space where tears fell there was now this cavern, a hollowed out place. And I wondered what fills this body of mine now that the daily tears have stopped?  What new room have I made?


III.

An idea began to formulate so bold that at first I turned away--shielded that part of me that has known such deep wounds. Could the easing of grief be as simple as deciding to actually live--not simply exist?  Could it be a matter of deciding?

Back in February when Rob told me to live brilliantly, he first warned me, no not warned for that is too tame a word for it. Rather he commanded me to not hide away.

"Don't you hide away," he told me.

What I could not know last February was that sometimes it feels necessary to hide in the dark--to pull the proverbial covers over my head--to rest what feels ladened with sorrow.


IV.

"It's heavier than I thought," I said to my brother.

Last night when my brothers came over, Brendan brought Rob's ashes with him.  I had asked him to do so. When he handed me the bag containing Rob's ashes, my first thought was how heavy it all is.  I had not expected my husband's remains to carry such weight.

Later after my brothers had left and I had placed the bag on a book shelf downstairs, I went to tell Devon. We hugged as touch is often more important than words and we each cried just a bit.

"It's not Dad," he told me.

"I know. We'll figure out what to do with the ashes," I told him. "At some point what we do will make sense."


V.

I don't know where the idea of choosing life over grief developed. I imagine if I reread what I have written these last 15 months, I might find a thread to tug and follow that would help me to better understand the evolution of this thought.

For now, I am less inclined to do so. For reasons I cannot explain, I have reached up and tugged that chain and light
               falls warm over me--lightens the darkened, heavy spaces I have known.

It's a matter of choice. When the body and the soul are ready--it's always a matter of choice.  I had forgotten. 

#SOL16: Bone and Heart

Devon sitting on the steps (2003)

I.


The second step from the top creaks. It seems hard to miss that step and as such it is now a familiar sound. A comforting sound. This has always been more home than house, faulty in its grace.

Only Rob, Dev and I have ever lived here. The house was new when we bought. Others that spring would outbid us and yet  Dave, the builder, sold it to us anyway. I'd like to think that he knew we were at our limit and that we would make this place he built a home. And we have.

We gave rise to that creak. We made it climbing up and down these stairs for the last 14 years. Bounding down and trudging up ladened with books and boxes and laundry and more times than I could count, the sleeping weight of a toddler. Time has loosened these stairs--caused the wooden treads to rub against the risers and stringers; to grind against the screws and nails that hold it all together.  And how odd it is that such a noise could be more solace than annoyance; more balm than pain?


II.


Rob climbed those stairs a year ago for the last time this month. He was unsteady on his feet and the climb up those stairs became too much for him to accomplish. We each did our best to not notice his unsteady and too heavy gait. We wanted it to be something temporary. We told one another how this set back would resolve itself with treatment. To pay note would have shifted the narrative from ever so hopeful to less so. And truly that bit of hope we held on to was more gift than not--more necessary than any pseudo cure the legion of doctors would prescribe and (un)prescribe.

On that last day he climbed the stairs, I washed him, washed his hair and we laughed at my clumsy attempts that morning. And how good it felt to laugh. He needed to sit  halfway through as holding his too-sick body up was too much to bear.  He could no longer manage such things. Even shaving become a chore and though I gave it a good try, he would take the razor from my hand and redo my first attempt. We were getting ready for what would be his first chemo treatment, as he had been cleared by the infectious disease doctor after five weeks of fighting a staph infection to finally receive treatment--treatment that would only land him back in the hospital in need of emergency thoracic surgery a week later. As the chemo stripped his body's defenses, the staph resurged growing into an abscess a millimeter from the right ventricle of his heart.

Rob would never see the second floor of our home again. Never walk up our stairs to our bedroom. Never sit in his favorite chair in the guest room which was more his study than not. Imagine that just seven weeks earlier he went up and down those stairs without a care. We each did.


III.


Late at night I listen, listen to welcome him home, as if his departed spiritual self might bear some weight when all things grow dark and the barriers between here and there grow thin. In the dark anything can happen, anything can be. Now and then I hear the tread of my now six-foot son take those stairs two at at a time well after midnight. He is in search of a glass of water, a glass of juice--and it will be the empty glass I find sitting in the sink the next morning that confirms this late night tale.

On his way up the stairs to his bedroom, I hear the creak and I think of Rob. I think how this home we made is part bone, part heart.

#SOL16: Sublime

from my art journal, 10.22.16 (gesso, found papers, acrylic paint, Tombow markers, tissue paper, ink)

I.

The weather has finally turned sending the too-hot and humid summer-like weather we had this past week in the Northeast US, packing.  Good riddance. The first fall-feeling day is here. Gale winds, raw cold, and buckets of rain ("Buckets of tears/Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears/Buckets of moonbeams in my hand...")

And it is absolutely glorious to walk in the fall of rain, feel the wind so strong tug at the umbrella that I must hold at an angle--less the wind with a sharp snap will turn it inside out. This afternoon I have the path to myself. No one else seems to have ventured forth and surely I can see the appeal of curling up with a good book in an oversized chair with some mint tea. I painted most of the morning, making the journal page at the top of this post and after lunch I found myself heading to that chair with some tea and a book. It was after all, raining.

So? I thought.  I transferred the hot tea to an old Starbucks cup, threw on a sweatshirt, and let myself outside after saying goodbye to Devon.  To me, nothing affirms life like a storm.


II.

I am rounding the last mile when the audio cuts out and my phone begins to ring. The display reads, Patty. My oldest friend in the world is phoning. We have known each other since we were each 4-years-old. I answer right away--using one hand to hold the umbrella and cup of tea and the other to put the phone closer to my mouth. We haven't spoken in a few months and I am eager to catch up. Between old friends there is no settling in to the conversation. No awkward pauses. No wondering what to say. There is just talk and lots of it--as if we talked every day. And well, I guess for so many years we did.

Pat tells me that creating helps ease grief.  Her husband John retired early and has taken up writing. "He says he needs two years.  One year to write and the next to reflect on that writing."

"How wise," I tell her, "to give himself that second year."

Pat's an art therapist. She recommends movement and creating as means to ease grief. She laughs telling me it was in the low 30s this morning in Michigan and raining too and she went out for a run anyway.  After about 20 minutes of which only the last 5 were dedicated to the election (Pat says with a chuckle that in Michigan all of the millennials and she voted for Sanders), she rings off as she is heading to a client.


III.

Later, after night has fallen and the wind has quieted a bit, I am reading an old copy of Flow Magazine.  I see there is an article about loss and begin reading. Dealing with loss says René Diekstra,

"is the ability to create something from our pain. This can be simple, like keeping a diary, contacting a fellow-sufferer or looking at a painting. Re-forging our pain can frequently lead to something sublime. The main question we must ask ourselves is: What can I do with my pain besides suffer from it?" (from Flow Magazine,  Issue 12).

What can I do? As much as there are days when I desire to stay active, I realize that I am even more partial to solitude. I enjoy writing and making art and both of these tend to be done alone. Painting all morning fueled me, allowed me to feel content and even, joyful.  It is the small acts that heal. Talking with an old friend. Walking in the rain. Watching what begins to emerge as I paint and become.

#SOL16: Holding Their Tongues and Impossible Futures

from my art journal 10.1.16 (Gesso, marker, acrylic paint)

I.

When I was 15,  I first read Edith Wharton's slim novel about impossible futures. By the end of Ethan Frome, tragedy has occurred.  Ethan and Mattie try for that impossible future by sledding into a big elm and neither accomplish the permanence of death. At the top of the hill, seated on a sled, the narrator comments that Ethan

"...sat still a moment, straining his eyes down the long hill, for it was the most confusing hour of the evening, the hour when the last clearness from the upper sky is merged with the rising night in a blur that disguises landmarks and falsifies distances."

And isn't this an apt description of those times we leave the present moment and try for a future that is not ours? What seems most certain in the present is obscured when we peer beyond where the soles of our feet meet earth. And yet the impulse to do so, remains strong.

II.


Tonight I wonder what it is it about impossible futures that beckon? Why do they seem to call to us when we would rather be anywhere but the present moment. Sorrow anchors a desire for what cannot be, while being fueled by all that has been lost. The tension between is almost too much to bear. Towards the end of his life, Rob's sure-footedness here on earth slipped more and more. And I could do nothing except bear witness as the pull for life lessened. The man I married left before his last breath gave out.

III.


The novel closes with the two residing once again under the weight of Ethan's too sad wife Zeena. The three know only sorrow and anger and pain. Mrs. Hale a fellow townsperson from Starkfield, closes the text by saying,

"And I say, if she'd ha' died, Ethan might ha' lived; and the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the Fromes up at the farm and the Fromes down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."

Imagine that holding your tongue is sum difference between living and not.


IV.

I'm a photographer with hundreds of photographs of our son and now each one reminds me of Rob. Something simple like getting Devon shoes when he was just a toddler is a story. I remember how very much we loved. Each image is a story we shared. A truth we learned. A record. Some are silly, others less so. But what I know tonight is that we lived fully, unlike poor Ethan and Mattie. We did not wait for a future that would not arrive. we lived. Ethan and Mattie flirted with love and lost. We did not.


V.

No more than an hour after Rob learned he would die, my husband's thoughts were of me and our son. As his grip on this world loosened he somehow found the grounding to tell me what I most needed to know--what I, at the time, did not know I would need so dearly.

"Live brilliantly," Rob would tell me. "Love Devon and live."

I am, Rob. I am.

#SOL16: On Writing and Teaching Writing

Art Conversations (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

I. 

Recently I wrote in the comments section of a blog, "I like to think every letter of every word written and the spaces between these words are a record of healing." 

And I do.

For the last six years that I have kept this blog, I never imagined how much I would grow to need it--to need you--my imagined reader. Back in 2009 when I first posted, I did so out of obligation. I was taking a weekend course at Bard College and everyone enrolled had to make a blog.  So I started this blog, posted, and did not write again for another 8 months. But even as I did not write, I knew in the back of my mind that there was this space waiting for me to fill.

Since then I have written more than 1500 posts and have published 1400 of those. Since Rob's diagnosis, I have written more than 200 posts, more than 100,000 words and I recognize that each utterance and the spaces between have been healing steps. 

Who knew I would ever need this like my very breath?

II. 

I think a lot about the intersections between writing and healing. And today, I am less sure that writing instruction at school is worthy of our children's time and attention. These commercial units of study that are so popular feel so contrived. So jammed up with tasks to do that thinking, yes thinking, feels somehow left out. Completion should never be mistaken for grand conversations. When I read the prepared units I think that learning is so outlined and calendered that one might wonder where there was room to pause. To think. To talk. To err.

I grow weary just thinking about the rush to teach so many different genres each year to children of all ages. Surely in this drive to pack it all in we may be missing what is most fundamental: 

Invention. 

Yes, invention is at the heart of writing. William Carlos Williams admonished us years ago when he wrote, "Shame on our poets/they have caught the prevalent fever:/impressed/by the 'laboratory,'/they have forgot/the flower!/which goes beyond all/laboratories!/They have quit the job/of invention. The/imagination has fallen asleep/in a poppy-cup."

When I think of learning, not necessarily teaching, writing seems more possible, more ready to wear, less stuffy. I want the young people I work with to make meaning because they must. I want them to do it daily and to do it with intention when possible. I want them to learn the art of contradiction, the wonder that comes when the poem writes itself, the frustration that happens when the page remains empty. I want them to live wide awake lives and take notice. I want them to privilege accuracy because the words and marks they place on a page matter so, as do their readers.

I want the young people I teach to learn writing by walking/wheeling/moving/chatting. The world beyond the school house beckons and we ought to help our young people build bridges with words and intentions to it--to gather the shorelines in their fists. I imagine writing instruction has more to do with painting--with mess making--with building stuff, than with strict guidelines about any particular genre. I shudder when imagining teaching a class to write poetry at the same time. No, not that. Never that. 

I would surely fail as a writing teacher today, likely I would be dismissed. But, I would fail brilliantly. Chuck those units of study out the nearest window or better yet use them as substrates to bloom beautiful works. At best, I would hope to occasion the interest in my students to see what might be waiting around the bend. To listen to what is not said. To consider the possibilities before them and say what must be said and honor, yes honor, the silence such saying might evoke.  We could sit awhile. Perhaps take tea. There is time for this. 

John Cage knew. I have nothing to say and I am saying it--may well be the first creative act after breathing.