2.10.2016

Edges (Nome, Alaska)

The days get muddled together when I recall. 8 years is a long time in many ways especially when I think of all the living that has happened from then to now.  On this past Saturday, I would remember the hospital room, the quietness of the floor so early in the morning, the oncologist. I would recall all of this and more, almost to the minute. 

5 a.m. and the interstate was more abandoned than not. A lone truck in the far right lane. It’s light cutting through the still darkness. By 6 a.m., I had coffee in hand for both of us and was making my way upstairs to the 3rd? or was it the 4th floor of the hospital?  Three hours later the oncologist who was supposed to be away surprised us. I don’t recall his exact words, but he said something about consulting with his partners, a cat scan, spread, and how Rob who only a few weeks earlier had a prognosis of at least another year of life, was now terminal. Less than 4 weeks, he would be dead. 

This past Saturday, I was sipping a second cup of coffee when the date hit me. February 10. 9 a.m.  I had come home from a client the afternoon before suddenly feeling miserable, certain I had caught a bug. Sore throat, achy, headache behind the eyes. The body knows what consciousness cannot always grasp. I went to sleep early, waking Saturday morning and feeling off. And then I remembered. That is what grief is. Years can pass and in the space of an ordinary day, a sip of coffee, a date and time , and 

     the knees 

fall out from under.

Oh, Earth

“And Full of Sleep” (M.A. Reilly)

I opened an email and read a new comment about a post written several years ago about art, affinity groups, and brick-based learning. As I reread the post I thought about how committed I was to making art and frankly how happy I was. I don’t recall being anything but happy in those days. I wrote that I was richer than Midas.

I only noticed the date of publication after I finished rereading and realized that a year later we would celebrate Rob’s last birthday. I could almost imagine the specifics of the day when I wrote the post. More than likely we had celebrated my birthday and Rob’s the night before. Proabaly a simple supper, some presents, and surely cake. We were born a day apart. I imagine as I wrote on my laptop that he was somewhere in the house reading the latest issue of The Nation or a novel and Dev was likely on line with friends from Virginia or Europe. We probably had tea later that night and Rob may have even read the post by then. He always read what I wrote and would have offered his thoughts.

A year later he would be diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer, could no longer walk, would have spent 50 days in two hospitals and had suffered through three surgeries, losing a rib in the last one. He would spend another 50 days in the hospital in January and February, and would die at home a month after Devon turned 17.

When I read the post written ten months prior to all that sickness and death, I marveled at the lightness and innocence that defined me and our home. Married to a man who I thought of as a soul mate, I had lived a charmed life. We loved our child, delighting in him in ways parents only do with one another, and for 13 years we had the best dog in the universe, our Golden Retriever, Max.

Reading about my past unsettles me. It’s like that moment in Our Town when Emily returns from the dead to witness an ordinary day in her life and she realizes that humans move through their lives barely, if at all, noticing one another.  I thought Rob and I would live with one another forever and boy did we have plans for the future. It’s not that I thought we would be immortal, but truthfully, I didn’t consider death. I was in my mid-fifties, and Rob was slightly older. We simply never dwelled in death.

The knowledge that in 14 months, the man who walked through life with such few cares would no longer be able to climb the single flight of stairs to our bedroom is chilling. Live brilliantly, he told me, just minutes after we learned the cancer was terminal. There are things I now know about life and the commitment made each day to not just breathe through it, but to live it boldly, presently, now. Ironically, the post was about the ways artist see.

Memory is part remembrance and part ache, colored by experience. The past is never just the past. We reinvent it with each new day of living.

#SOL17: Tea Time

Breathe (M.A. Reilly, 2014)

I.

After a husband dies, living is work--arduous work at times. Nothing feels familiar, or easy--except home. And yet,  there are days when that familiarity feels difficult too. Coming home at night to find no lights on, speaks to the emptiness I sometimes feel.

On such nights, even the house is mourning.


II.

A quick glance at the cushion on the living room chair brings back Rob's last few months of life and how when he was home, he spent all his time in that reclining chair.  At first it was simply a matter of comfort. Lying flat on his back upstairs in bed hurt too much. Too quickly though--a matter of just weeks, and the chair became a necessity as the cancerous lesions compressed his spine and he was no longer able to climb stairs, to walk, and eventually to stand.

During that time I felt like a rat on wheel--turning faster and faster and getting no where. I would buy one kind of device to help him and within days, sometimes even hours, it would no longer suffice. In the period of a few weeks Rob went from walking on his own, to needing a cane occasionally, to needing a four-prong cane all the time, to using a walker, and then to hobble into a transport chair, before paralysis and death creeped in. He spend 100 days of his last five months of life in hospitals, and each time he came home, he was less and less able.


III.

After his death, I still make tea each night. The matching teacups remind me of the last Maine trip we took. During the 28 years we were together one of us would make tea for the other. A ritual. Regardless of what we were doing we took time to talk over the day while sipping tea. A bit of milk for me and a dollop of honey for Rob.

As I write this I am sipping mint tea from one of the mugs we bought in Maine--I have given up dairy, something Rob was after me to do all those years.

 "Your sinuses will thank you," he would tell me.

I'd like to think that in some parallel world Rob is enjoying tea too. Someday, the memories will be sweet without the painful tug at the heart.

#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: Poetry, Rob and Love

Two-pages from my art journal: 6.10.16 (gesso, acrylic and gouache paints, ink, pencil, collage papers)

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

      - William Butler Yeats, The Lake Isle of Innisfree 

I.

The first date Rob and I went on was to a poetry festival in northern New Jersey. It was 1988. We met in graduate school--both of us were English majors. I cannot recall which poets we heard that day, but do recall thinking that I had surely met the most fascinating man I would ever know. That day, in between the verses, Rob spoke to me about Joyce and Einstein, Stravinsky and Yeats, Heisenberg and Gödel, Creeley and Olsen. Years later we would name our dog, Maximus, after Olsen's three-volume masterwork.  The first time I returned to Ireland so many years after I left that orphanage in Dublin, Rob drove us to Lough Gill in County Sligo so that we could row out to Innisfree and hear the bee-loud glade.

Literature was a backdrop to the lives we made, the love we grew.  After Rob and I decided to marry I told him had we had an actual ceremony that required invitations, we could have simply sent out, "yes I said yes I will Yes" à la Molly Bloom. But I am getting ahead of myself, ahead of this narrative that is taking shape.

On that blustery fall day in 1988, it felt unseasonably cool even though there was bright sunshine or at least that's how I remember it.

II.

Memory is fairly faulty, unreliable and I so wonder how it is I will remember Rob in years to come. What is it that will remain as time moves along? What will I recall? Savor? Desire? In The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us About Life After Loss, George Bonanno explains,

Memories of people and places are not objects in our heads. They are clusters of snakelike neurons, arranged in branching pathways throughout the brain. The strength of a memory has to do with the connections of the neurons, their links to other ideas and other memories. The more elaborated the memory, the easier it is to find its neural address (p. 17).

Rob is surely a gorgeous snake living in my mind, as our lives were so entwined. Bonanno explains that calling forth positive memories can be a source of comfort and healing for the bereaved. Living in the home Rob, Devon and I made for the last 14 years, every square foot is a reminder of my husband. His eye glasses remain on his desk. His Walter Benjamin books--the last books he was reading--are stacked now on a shelf in the living room. The comforter he wrapped himself in, sits next to me. I am sitting in a reclining chair as I write this--the same one Rob sat and slept in after he was diagnosed with cancer and could no longer climb the stairs to our bedroom. We did not know then that he would never again see the upstairs of our home after mid October. Washing Rob's hair one Friday morning was the last thing we ever did up upstairs together.  And today I am so grateful that it was with such care and tenderness that I washed his hair--as if some part of me knew.

Later that day we would go to see a neurosurgeon who would tell us that Rob did not need spinal surgery at that time. Three months later, his partner would operate on Rob and a month later my husband would come home to die.

III.

I have been sorting through books. For some reason it feels important to gather all the poetry books in our house and put them together--a feat we attempted but never quite got done.  And this handling of poetry has me remembering. It's a late winter's day--the last year I will teach high school and Rob came to read to my students.  He showed up with his knapsack over a shoulder opened, hair tied back, and a fistful of loose papers--poems he had brought to read. He stood there wearing a leather jacket, a striped shirt he had left untucked, a pair of dark brown corduroy jeans that hugged his ass just so, and a worn pair of work boots and of course, his glasses that made him look a lot like John Lennon. By then we were so in love, so in lust and I recall how beginnings are always so much fun.

After I introduced him to my senior students he promptly climbed on top of a desk and began reciting some poem in the voice of the upper-crust English. About 30 seconds in he abruptly stopped, looked down at the students and told them that poetry need not be so lofty, so foreign. And with that he got off the desk and sat alongside the students and read some of his poems, gesturing with his hands as he read.  He read about getting clean and sober. He read about the way faith feels on the streets of the lower West Side. He invited students to read and before long a poetry slam was in the making.

Later that day, as we drove to my home, he would ask me what it was like to be a teacher.

"You always seem to really, really like what you do," he said to me. Rob seemed to marvel at this as if for him enjoyment and work did not occupied similar or adjacent spaces.

"Well, of course I do."

When Rob turned 40 he sold the three-generation family business in Hell's Kitchen and we tightened the proverbial belt as he became a teacher. For 20 years he taught: college students, middle and high school students, and teachers. No matter where we would travel, or what restaurant we might be eating in--some student he taught or a parent of a former student would greet him and quickly explain to Devon and me what an amazing teacher Rob had been.

I know.


IV.

On that fall day as we sat alongside one another, listening to poet after poet, I felt we were fated and it scared me.  I had never known an attraction so electric, so present-moment. By that next fall we would live together and a year later we would marry and then become parents to Devon. Throughout all of this that love that felt so palpable that fall day become more complicated as it deepened.

Loving Rob was like hearing a much-loved poem. Each time, regardless of the number of times, the poem still takes you by surprise. You marvel at its
             quick beauty and fiery depth. You marvel
at what you most needed
               and did not know.

Rob lives in my deep heart's core.

#SOL16: A Son and the Word of God

The New Fire Truck 

I.

When I think of the many ways that Rob loved his son, I am reminded of a line from Cormac McCarthy's The Road. At the beginning of the novel, the father is speaking about his son and says, "He knew only that his child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke."

The word of God. Yes, that is how complete and full Rob's love for Devon was. But now and again I wonder if Devon will really remember his dad.  He is just 17. Will he be able to still hear the sound of his dad's voice? Will he recall the many car trips? Will he recall watching each episode of Stars Wars with him multiple times save the most recent one that his dad could not see? Will he remember how his dad smelled? How he walked? The sound of his laugh? The way he ran his hands through his loose hair gathering the strands into a pony tale? How he looked you in the eyes so directly when you spoke?

My mom and me

What memories will remain after a year?
Ten years?
Forty years?
What will he most remember about his Dad?

II.

On the bureau in our bedroom is a photograph of my mom and me. I am most likely 12, just a few years younger than Devon is now.  When I look at the photo, I realize that I can't recall much of anything from that time--and certainly nothing related to how I was feeling or the way my mom was. That time is quite lost. I'm astounded by what I can't recall. Viewing the image has me wondering how much of the time Dev spent with his dad will he really remember as the decades march by.

#SOL16: When Words Fail

Rob

I was tired. So I lay down.
My lids grew heavy. So I slept.
Slender memory, stay with me. 

- Li-Young Lee, Mnemonic

I.

After greeting Rob yesterday morning, I realized that he no longer knew who I was. Just 12 hours earlier we were holding hands and singing I Want to Hold Your Hand. And though I know the progression of the disease, the mix of drugs, and of course, the dying process, all contribute to his confusion, words fail me as to how best to tell you what this feels like.

Each day I lose him in ways I don't expect, as does our son.


II.

When words fail there remains touch.  One of the startling things I have learned is that Rob recognizes me even though he cannot name me.  I'm stored in his brain in lots of ways.  He responds to the sound of my voice, the touch of my hands, and certain features that he has always liked (my eyes).  For now, I take solace in these ways of connecting.

Earlier this evening, the English Lord, a persona of Rob's that is fairly new showed up.  When I asked him if I was just some serving wench, he said in his crusty upperclass British accent, "More or less." My brother Jack and I were there and we both laughed and I leaned down to kiss me lord.

Even in this sorry state we find brief moments of delight.