Poetry Break: The Cold Night

Pastoral (M.A. Reilly, 2012) THE COLD NIGHT by William Carlos Williams

It is cold. The white moon is up among her scattered stars -- like the bare thighs of the Police Sergeant's wife -- among her five children . . . No answer. Pale shadows lie upon the frosted grass. One answer: It is midnight, it is still and it is cold . . . ! White thighs of the sky! a new answer out of the depths of my male belly: In April . . . In April I shall see again -- In April! the round and perfect thighs of the Police Sergeant's wife perfect still after many babies. Oya!

#SOL16: The New Normal

Downtown Columbus, OH (M.A. Reilly, iPhone, 2016)

Devon and I were in Ohio this past weekend, attending a Counter Strike tournament which sported a $1,000,000 prize purse and had teams from around the world competing. I know almost nothing about the game or the teams that competed. Devon began schooling me last week as we watched a few matches at home and I quickly began to get a handle on the teams, the objectives, and some of the strategies. E-sports are big in our home and before Rob died he told me that I needed to step in and support Devon in his interest in this computer game like he would have.

At the Tournament

Months ago this tournament was announced and it was the first time a Counter Strike major tournament was being held in the United States. Devon plays on a team and competes and so he was excited about it being relatively close to home. Unfortunately with Rob sick at the time we couldn't commit to going and though Devon is 17, he is too young to rent a hotel room. Like most things, Devon understood all of this and said it wasn't a big deal, but Rob and I each knew differently. With all that was going on with Rob, he and I forgot about the tournament and Devon didn't bring it up again.

A couple of weeks after Rob died I asked Devon about the tournament and if it had happened. He told me it was happening the first week of April and I asked him whether he still wanted to go. He was able to secure two tickets and we made the trip here. At that time when we were having these discussions most everything scared me. Losing Rob undermined my capacity to make simple decisions and to take almost any initiative. Even as I felt paralyzed, I recognized the need to act nonetheless. I have traveled all over the world with and at times without Rob. Traveling from the east coast to Ohio was hardly a sojourn. It felt important to do this and be here for Devon and so I booked the flight, arranged the hotel, and actually had a very good time with my son. It has been a long time since we were able to get away and though I had a few weepy moments thinking about how much Rob would have enjoyed this with his son, overall the long weekend went well.

This is the new normal. In getting on with living, Devon and I need to create new rituals, new memories. Nothing is harder and yet, nothing feels more necessary.  And though it may not seem like a big deal, going to Ohio this weekend was a start.

Poetry Break: April in Maine

Spring Ice on Pond (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood, NJ, 2009)

A friend, Nelson Campbell, posted the poem below as a reply to a poem I posted yesterday. It is so grand, so perceptive that I wanted to share it more widely.  Years ago, the first time Rob and I went to Maine it was early April. We left Manhattan and it was 50 degrees and ten hours later we finally stopped in Freeport, Maine because the snow kept falling. At first we thought it was nothing more than a snow shower, but as we travelled north, we realized we were in a bonfide snow storm. We ended up staying at an inn that had just been open. We would return to that inn annually for the next 27 years.

Thanks Nelson and of course, thank you May Sarton.

April in Maine 

         by May Sarton 


The days are cold and brown,
Brown fields, no sign of green,
Brown twigs, not even swelling,
And dirty snow in the woods.

But as the dark flows in
The tree frogs begin
Their shrill sweet singing,
And we lie on our beds
Through the ecstatic night,
Wide awake, cracked open.

There will be no going back.



April in Maine" by May Sarton, from Collected Poems: 1930-1993. © W.W. Norton & Company, 1992. 

Poetry Break: In April

Spring (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

In April

James Hearst

This I saw on an April day:
Warm rain spilt from a sun-lined cloud,
A sky-flung wave of gold at evening,
And a cock pheasant treading a dusty path
Shy and proud.


And this I found in an April field:
A new white calf in the sun at noon,
A flash of blue in a cool moss bank,
And tips of tulips promising flowers
To a blue-winged loon.


And this I tried to understand
As I scrubbed the rust from my brightening plow:
The movement of seed in furrowed earth,
And a blackbird whistling sweet and clear
From a green-sprayed bough.

#SOL16: Bone Deep

A road (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Being a widow is not special or unique. Just this year I am one in 800,000. That is the number of new widows and widowers annually according to the Institute of Medicine.

Death happens.
Husbands die.
Wives too.

And with each of those deaths, a part of those who loved them best dies too. 8 million people annually experience death of an immediate family member. Do knowing these facts relieve the pining, the desperate wanting, the guilt for living on, for coveting life?

There are so many different ways of knowing. Here in the States, we tend to rely on demonstrating our smartness by displaying bits of knowledge. We learn this first at school and I suspect it is a lesson that sticks. Such knowledge is safe. It is a territory already defined.

But there are things that can't be known ahead of experience. There the territory is wild, unplanned. Here you could wander for years. This is the place where grief is bone deep.

#SOL16: A Nanosecond Gone

Counting (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

"When Albert Einstein married space and time in his theory of relativity back in 1905, he taught us that our eyes are time machines. Nothing can go faster than the speed of light, the cosmic speed limit, and so all information comes to us, to the present, from the past...The light from the center of the Milky Way, hiding behind the thick star clouds and dust lanes of Sagittarius, takes 26,000 years to get here. While it was on the way the first primitive ice age villages grew into skyscrapered metropolises. Your lover, brushing your lashes with his or her breath, is a nanosecond gone"  - Dennis Overbye, From NY Times, 4.1.16.

I.

Less than a month away from death, Rob took note of the announcement of the existence of gravitational waves telling me about it as soon as I entered his hospital room. I wish I could recall more of what he said that day as somehow he connected this announcement with the presence of
multiverses. He would tell me at another time that he thought heaven found its expression in the slippages between and among parallel universes.

We took time that day--a day after Rob's oncologist told us that his cancer was now terminal--to listen to the recorded waves. The sound was hauntingly beautiful, reminding me of recordings of whale songs I listened to decades early. Gravitational waves are ripples in the fabric of spacetime. They are caused when a massive object, like a black hole, is accelerated. The waves detected recently happened when two black holes collided 1.3 billion light-years from earth. The detection of these waves was captured by LIGO observatory which relied on sound rather than sight to detect this cosmic happening.

II.

Almost two months later I am wondering about what Rob might have been on about that day.  I am thinking about how our conventional concept of time is so incomplete, especially when we consider spacetime.  I am thinking that being open to other ways to know feels like an object lesson here.

I like to think that in another space, another parallel universe, Rob lives and what he wanted me to learn that day was that my job was not to follow the metaphorical breadcrumbs,  but to live well.

Here.
Right, now.


  

#SOL16: My Past Restored

Storm Approaching (M.A. Reilly Tuscany, 2014) 

I.

On September 8th we learned Rob's lung cancer was either stage 3 or stage 4. On September 11, we packed a portable oxygen tank and had dinner with our doctor and his family--close friends of ours. Rob was still recovering from a 7-hour VATs procedure he had at the end of August. And though Rob would live for almost 6 more months, this dinner would be Rob's last social outing of his life. The health complications and cancer would keep him from most everything.  And though he was exhausted by the time we returned home that night, he was joyful at having spent the night doing what he most loved--interacting with others...sharing stories...thinking and loving. The visit was good for both of us. It went a long way to restore our fragile sense of selfhood. We were more than lung cancer could dictate.

On the next Monday, September 14, we were up and out of the house by 5:30 a.m. in order to be at the hospital for the insertion of a power port. It was a quick procedure--one done in anticipation of chemotherapy treatment. As I have written before, the surgeon on that early morning would inset not only the port into the upper right side of Rob's chest, but also HA-MRSA--- hospital acquired staph infection that is resistant to antibiotics. At the end of the next week, instead of having the first chemotherapy treatment, Rob would be transported to the hospital by our local ambulance squad where he would spend 12 hours in an emergency room being diagnosed with staph before being admitted to the hospital. He remained in the hospital through October 6. Once home, I administered IV antibiotics daily and Rob had radiation treatment. He was cleared by an infectious disease doctor for chemo and had his first treatment at the end of October--two days before Halloween.

We thought this was nothing more than a one month delay. But this was not to be. After receiving chemo, Rob developed a massive abscess in his chest.  The first staph infection hadn't been treated correctly and with his suppressed immune system, the staph infection grew and grew. The abscess required thoracic surgery, the removal of a rib, and after he was released from the hospital mid November, I administered for another 4 weeks antibiotics, 3 times a day. Rob had chemo treatment in December and was supposed to have it again on December 30th but he was again transported from home to hospital because he could no longer walk. A diagnosis of spinal cord compression required emergency spinal surgery followed by rehabilitation which was interrupted by yet another staph infection which returned Rob to the hospital towards the end of January. In early February he was supposed to receive immunotherapy treatment (Opdivo) but was unable to because of a fever he spiked.  After multiple chest x-rays and a CT scan, we learned that the cancer had spread through Rob's body and his illness was no longer treatable.

II.

In the space of a few months, Rob shifted from being an actor to being acted upon; from laughing often, freely, and with great expression to being dulled and confused by massive amounts of narcotics used to relieve pain. Rob enjoyed chatting up the barista, the dry cleaner, the pharmacist--just about anyone. He went from being out and about to being housebound and later bed bound.  He shifted from a man who had recently taken up walking in July to one who would no longer be able to stand by the close of December.

It was all so quick. These changes didn't even have time to rock us. They buried us instead. Each time we thought we were out ahead of the staph infections, the lung cancer, the cord compression and we could live a bit we were faced with a new and more deadly complication.

What I could not know then, was that I too was undergoing changes. It was so hard to be cognizant of myself as I was so directed to caring for and about Rob. Fundamental definitions of self I once took for granted were crumbling. Who was I now that the man I had loved for nearly 3 decades was battling cancer, then dying, leaving here, leaving me? When Rob died, a part of me did too.

III.

Some days when I am home alone I sob loudly and shout. Mostly I yell things like, I want you to come back to me, Rob. I want you now.  At these times I feel cheated. Abandoned. Lonely. Sad. Bereft. I say out loud, It was not supposed to be like this. Rob was not supposed to leave me. It's like I want a do-over as if Rob's death was some kind of error that needs to be corrected.

Later, after the wave of tears has subsided I turn again to C.S. Lewis's A Grief Observed--a touchstone book, for sure. There he chronicles his range of responses when his wife died.  I am stopped by his insight as to why he wants his wife back when he writes, "I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past" (p. 41).

And I nod, knowing the desire for this ingredient all to well. For it is the restoration of my past that I am most seeking. I want what I have had and I want it at a huge cost.  Lewis asks, "Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again?" (p. 41).

This makes me pause and recall what Rob went through.  He worked for four weeks to die. Four weeks. He worked to first remember he was dying after the terrible shock wore off.  He thought he would be getting a new lung cancer treatment--a promising one--and instead he received a diagnosis that his case was now terminal.  Four weeks earlier he was told he had at least six months to live o he would not have been able to have the spinal surgery.  He worked to accept he his life would end and that he would need to leave Devon and me. He made provisions for us in so many ways. He refused food and suffered through increased pain. He lost touch with this reality and seemed to enter another world populated by people he knew before who had passed. He forgot he could not walk. He refused all fluids. His blood pressure dropped so low it could no longer be read. His oxygen level dropped as well. He was frightened by the quick build up of fluids in his lungs, waking from sleep to gasp. He felt his jaw unhinge, his circulation slow, his breath rattle, until finally there was just the absence of breath and then the absence of him.

Would I wish that for him again just so my past could be restored?

Never.

My past with Rob cannot be had again. It is over.

 Live brilliantly he told me an hour after we learned his illness was terminal.

Live brilliantly.
I'm trying, Rob. I'm trying.