#SOL18: Live

Painting I made after Rob’s death. I incorporated his writing into the work. 

“A beloved spiritual teacher once told me that I kept protecting myself from losses that had already happened.”  Geneen Roth, This Messy, Magnificent Life: A Field Guide, p. 15.

I.

I’m heading south. The sun has yet to rise and the sway of the double decker train might lull me to sleep at another time, but not this morning. I’m reading Geneen Roth’s new book when I find myself suddenly stopping to reread the line I quoted at the top of this post. Something in these words has pulled me from the shared universe of book and reader into this present moment. The words resonate for I too have attempted to safeguard myself from old pain.

The heart wants what it wants.

What the last two years have taught me about grief is that new pains arise. Or at least I used to think they were new. Now I’m less sure.

I want to think that the last vestiges of grief are signaled by an acceptance to give up self-protection and live knowing the very definition of living is so often some degree of pain. Living first meant contending with the multiple losses that accompany any one death.

II.

What might Rob make of my and Devon’s lives now?

A few days ago, Dev and I watched the recent Star Wars movie—the name escapes me. By my count this must be episode 8. Both Rob and Devon were fans of Star Wars and for the first time that I can recall I experience a sense of Rob as the film started. It was brief—perhaps a minute or so and quite understated, but nonetheless there was a shift in energy. I felt his presence—a shiny kindness that surrounded me. As the feeling dissipated I looked up and outside a back window—the same window I stared out of for the 19 days Rob had been home before he died—the reddest cardinal I have ever seen sat on a snow covered branch. It remained there for more than 5 minutes and finally I turned my eyes back to the movie.

III.

I thought moving on was the goal. Now I see that as more trap than movement. It’s not moving on after all. It’s living. Nothing more than that.

Live.

Live, brilliantly.

#SOL17: I will arise and go now

Forgetfulness (M.A. Reilly)

I.

From somewhere in the high heavens, the places I could not see, far beyond my gaze, there was a future floating down. I was alive, feet on the earth, so I could not outrun that future and slowly it covered me up.

There is, my dear friend, in the heart of every living being, the will to go on. 

- KAO KALIA YANG, Your Threads Have Come Undone: A Letter to a Grieving Husband

The words quoted here are from a letter, Kao Kalia Yang wrote to a stranger who was deep in grief. Her words are poetic, brave, fierce, and so very, very right. I have been struggling to understand what it is I have mostly learned these last two years and it is the unquestionable understanding that the will to live is an untamed pulse.  Something fundamental urges adherence to living when the self is less sure of breath. 

At first I didn't feel. Shock insulates, slows the blood. Then I resurfaced and forgot. Each step in the day was a moment to anticipate Rob. I surfaced and remembered and it hurt in ways that defy language. When light began to creep in, to sink below the shut eyes of doubt it was largely because of the company I kept. Awakening happened alongside others deep in their own bereavement--mostly women I met in grief circles. In time I shared and shouldered sorrow and joy, and these connections rerooted me to the planet, to earth. I was feet to the soil. 

A day or two ago, a friend, Sandy, commented on a set of images I have been making this summer.  The presence of blackbirds can be found in so many of my paintings and truthfully I had no reason I could name as to why their presence in each painting was so prominent. She told me what I simply had not seen:

Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life

Birds in Flight (M.a. Reilly, 2017)

You were only waiting for this moment to arise 

- The Beatles

II. 

What now feels like a million years ago, though it was just the summer of 1990, Rob and I traveled north of Sligo to visit Innisfree. There we were rowed across the lake to the island and spent the day in Yeats' bee-loud glade. Born there was the promise of something permanent and something also fleeting.

I will arise and go now.

 And I am.

#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: What Will We Make Of This Day?

From my art journal, May 17 2016 (Gesso primer, gouache paints, digital print)

I was reading the poem, "Long Point Light" by Mark Doty and I was so taken by the closing lines of the poem.  

"...Here is the world you asked for,

    gorgeous and opportune,

here is nine o'clock, harbor-wide,

  and a glinting code: promise and warning.

    The morning's the size of heaven.

What will you do with it?"

It spoke to me and I wanted to represent how I was feeling, so I opened my art journal, selected some gouache paints to mix, wet both pages, and began to paint. 

I like the unfinished quality of the work. I appreciate how this two-page spread is imperfect--as if it too knew instinctively that the world before it is unfinalized, open to interpretation and actions.  

And as I reread Doty's words I could not help but think of Rob's earlier ones to me that he uttered last February from his hospital bed, "Live brilliantly."

Each day helps me to better understand that two-word phrase. This day is before me and the morning is the size of heaven. 

This morning is before you, too.  What will each of us will make of it?