#SOL16: Silence

Pea Island, OBX (M.A. Reilly 2014)

I.

On the sea of everyday talk it's easy to lose track, to tuck a self far beneath the chatter. Here, navigation is less sure. In the absence of a self no position can be determined. Live this way for too long and abject certainty replaces discovery. The self we know is more portrait than flesh. A polaroid that fades over time.

Sorrow cuts a path through the noise of the day and opens us to silence. Too much talk leaves us unmoored--the shoreline a distant memory.

I promised myself after Rob's death that I would not fill my days with tedium, a barrage of meaningless activities. I promised Rob I would not hide away and I have learned these last six months that there are so many ways to hide. I promised my husband I would live brilliantly as he commanded in those last days when he was still lucid. What I could not know then was how important silence would be.  Learning to live with and even embrace the uncomfortableness of silence is to lose the self and in doing so--the permanency of love becomes known.

II.

Love changed me. How could it not? Across these 28 years, Rob's love showed me a self I did not know I was becoming. When Rob told me to live brilliantly, he also told me something I could not bear to write here before--to share publicly.

On that snowy February morning, we were alone in his hospital room after the oncologist told us the prognosis. Rob held my hands and in the strongest of voices said, "People are drawn to you. There's  an energy about you that draws people towards you." I must have looked down or looked away, because he jerked my hands and said, "Don't you dare hide away."

And in that moment, I felt the truth of his words. At the time I was so embarrassed to write what transpired, but now I know that I write what he taught me to love. The fallible is most beautiful.

III.

Recently Devon and I were driving and I asked him, "What are you most looking forward to this coming year?"

And without hesitation he said, "Making a difference."

My son's response resonated and I thought about the driving need to serve others that has arisen after Rob's death.  Who we are is shaped in relationship to other. Thomas Merton speaks about the co-specifying nature of love in the essay, "Love and Need: Is Love a Package or a Message?" He writes,

My true meaning and worth are shown to me not in my estimate of myself, but in the eyes of the one who loves me; and that one must love me as I am, with my faults and limitations, revealing to me the truth that these faults and limitations cannot destroy my worth in their eyes; and that I am therefore valuable as a person, in spite of my shortcomings, in spite of the imperfections of my exterior “package" (p.34). 

In the silence of these last six months, I have learned that love sustains. For 28 years Rob and I kept each other's counsel and his passing has opened spaces large enough for me to stand still, be silent, and listen. And though the tears and sorrow that have come alongside much of this silence frightens me, not feeling is more alarming. I knew my husband loved me, but it would be months after that brief conversation in early February when we first learned Rob would die and die soon that I began to understand the immense transforming nature of love. The distance between who I am and who I want to become is illuminated by the silence, defined by love.  My husband's lessons in love inspire me to be a better person--to do good in the world--and to measure success by kindness shown to others.

#SOL16: Doorways and Walls

The House by the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

"I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering--but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are." - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

I.

For the last year I have tried to find meaning in Rob's sickness and in his death. I've wanted to soothe what seems impervious to soothing. Since his death, I experience, most often daily, a reoccurring shock.  How could a man just 60 who so imbued life with such joy, optimism, and love wake with a sharp pain in his side one morning in late summer and 6 months later die?

I've sought an explanation I could hold in hand.
I have wanted to hold something concrete.

II.

I noticed recently that I keep track of ages now.

I'm driving when I hear the end of a news show. The announcer says that the young man, the subject of the show,  began a museum. He died at age 32 from cancer. I stop listening and catalogue the age and death. Later another announcer will say that Gene Wilder has died at 83. On Facebook I read that a man I worked with a few years ago lost his wife, who was just 46.

The age at death fascinate me now. And each announcement I measure against Rob's death: younger, same age, older.


III.

I see now that my understanding of death is immature, ill informed. Without a strong spiritual belief, death leads nowhere. It is a wall that cannot be passed through.

I think about this as I read Thomas Merton's Love and Living.  There he wrote, "Yet merely to declare that when a living being ceases to live, it 'dies,' is perhaps to say nothing of any importance at all" (p. 97). Without a spiritual grounding the most profound meaning I can muster is that there is none. Death severed from life is meaningless. We live. We die.

Merton understands death as a doorway we walk through.  He writes that human death allows us to "receive the gift of pure actuality in the love of God" (p. 105).  For Merton we undergo several deaths: the death of the ego as we move from child to adult; the death of more juvenile ideas as we mature, the death of the body.  Merton writes, "As man grows into other stages of human development, he realizes that there are ways in which life affirms itself by consenting to end" (p. 101).

Consenting to end.

IV.

Early in Love and Living Merton tells us, "And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything— provided you see who it is that is acting" (p. 14). I know this inquiry into who is acting is important. With what voice do I utter these words?

Everyone dies. The pain of knowing even beloved husbands die years too early sticks with me.

V.

Towards the end of Rob's life he told me he believed in God. He said it as if it was a foregone conclusion and frankly I was a bit surprised. But I watched as he moved through denial he was dying. He seemed to forget the prognosis. Then I watched as he was trying to remember an important appointment he needed to attend. During this time he was so busy moving and fixing things I could not see with his hands. Then there was the raw and painful acceptance that he was dying and that he wanted to end his life.  He told Devon he would be dead by 2:30.  Then there was the move to a greater interior life where he told me he had to figure out how to cross over and later that he had figured this out.  Last there was the consenting to end as I watched my husband slip from here to somewhere else.

Not a wall, but a window, a door, an opening.

To sever Rob's life from his death is to close a door, wall up a window, render one a cripple.  Death is not the event. It is not.