#SOL16: Covered with Stars

Free Verse (M.A. Reilly)

  "...Don't worry, sooner or later I'll be home.
                Red-cheeked from the roused wind,

I'll stand in the doorway
   stamping my boots and slapping my hands,
             my shoulders
                 covered with stars."

                                 Mary Oliver, "Walking Home from Oak-Head," Our World, p 45.

I.

Across these last three months since Rob died, I have cried some days a little, other days more so. But the tears last for a brief duration and then they end. What feels like months of crying is in essence thirty minutes or so.  It is hard to calculate time as these waves of grief feel more out of time than in. And alongside these tears there is also laughter.  My 28 years with Rob taught me to enjoy life, to find absurdity a comfort, and to laugh often.

Bereavement isn't a singular feeling. Like so much of life, bereavement is complex. Yes, sadness for me is potent, and so too is humor and laughter. There is solace in finding small joys in the everyday things that help to frame my life with my son. Devon continues to amaze and delight me and I notice more how many of his mannerism and gestures resemble his dad's.

Losing Rob has not rendered me apolitical. I have strong feelings about the upcoming presidential election and look forward to casting my vote in the NJ primary later today and casting my vote in November. During the last few months of Rob's life we discussed the upcoming election often.  I can recall the many times Rob raised concerns about a Donald Trump or a Ted Cruz presidency.

Losing Rob has not stopped me from living each day and now I can anticipate a future albeit quite fuzzy, but nonetheless oddly present and at times exciting. I am learning that I am resilient in ways I simply had no need to test before or to name. Beneath that resiliency is unrealized strength that I am learning to use mostly out of necessity.

II.

Live brilliantly, my husband told me before he died. And at first I thought that meant entering into the largeness of life and being somehow dashing. I thought about the job I passed on in Afghanistan.  Is this what Rob meant?  Is that the brilliant living?

But now I know that isn't it.

In the same conversation when Rob told me to live brilliantly, he also told me,"You draw people to you. You attract others."  At the time I was so disturbed by the diagnosis that his cancer was no longer treatable, that I didn't dwell on his words.  But I remembered them.  It's an odd thing--grief. So many events I don't recall, and yet I can relive the last 6 months of Rob's life in slow motion. When I think about his message to me, I think Rob was telling me that I love easily, that I love fully. There's a brilliance to that. I rarely temper passion and this leads to an optimism about life. I deeply believe in the goodness of people, the goodness of life.

Living brilliantly is more about love and less about doing any particular thing. It's about being present, being a good parent to our son, loving without constraint and remaining open to possibility. In many ways this is how we made our life together.


III.

I offer these words, as slim and incomplete as they might be, in order to say that each person's grief has its own signature, timetable, need and response. For me there are no stages of grief, just as there are no sanctioned ways to feel or be.  I think of grief more as strange attractor, than a stage. For it is oscillation, not linear movement that better describes the last 9 months. And like strange attractors, there is organization to the chaos. In the chaos of grief, love is the force that organizes.

And it is out of love, that understanding develops. In the last week, I am awakening and noticing joy and an optimism I had not named before. The most important gift Rob and I made during our marriage was a deeper definition of love, imperfect love. For it was our imperfection as beings, as husband and wife, as parents that most allowed us to love so boldly, so bravely. We were going to err and there was beauty in letting that happen. It is within the ordinary bits of living and loving that who we are best finds expression.

IV.

Dear Rob,  I have finally arrived home once more, red-cheeked from the roused wind, my shoulders covered with stars. Somewhere in a parallel world I know you are cheering.

#SOL16: Nowness of Life

from my art journal with Berry poem. 6.5.16, (gesso, gouache paints, stabilo pencil, acrylic paint)

Each day I walk outside.  I thought it was the walking that mattered so, but realize that it is the walking and that I do so outside.  It is the communing with nature that is particularly centering. There's a poem by wendell Berry, The Peace of Wild Things, in which the speaker tells us how he comes "into the peace of wild things/who do not tax their lives with forethought/of grief." Grief is taxing.

I walk each day to remember my small place within it and to feel the nowness of living. Some days, I remember that this is enough.

#SOL16: I Could Not Follow

from my art journal: 6.3.16, (gesso, acrylic and gouache paint)

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
                                                                                                ― Pablo Neruda

I.

Most days I try to remember what Rob and I were doing a year ago.  I try to call up a day prior to Rob's diagnosis of cancer as if calling up such a memory might restore a bit of what has been lost.

How were we living our lives? With what intensity did we greet life? Were we as complacent as Emily from Our Town says all humans are? Did I make time to show Rob how much I love him?

I check the calendar and note that a year ago, Rob and I were at a school in Newark. More than likely we drove together as we did most days, stopping on the way in for a cup of coffee and to drop Devon off at school.  Last June was a super busy time for both of us as we were completing work for three clients that involved lots of teaching and curriculum planning sessions. We were in a rhythm and looking forward to the long stretch of summer ahead.

II.

A year later and Rob is gone and in that immense absence I am weakened, unsteady, broken. I have bargained with God until I'm mostly mute and I see now that the passage of time does not ease the pain, does not make the loss of Rob any easier.

Sorrow remains. Well planted. Vocal.

III.

Keep busy I've been told, but know this: No series of activities can fill the gap his absence leaves. Rob is the missing weight from my life, the familiar love I turned to over and over again across the last three decades.

The weight of the paint on the brush, the word on the page, the voice of a friend--these sometimes anchor me to this earth, this life, this unknown place that I now reside.

#SOL16: Your House Stands

Dust of Snow (M.A. Reilly 2014)

I. 

The death of my husband unseated a sense of sureness that once framed the place I know as home. Now home feels less permanent, less safe. Where I live now, sorrow grows like trees, deep rooted with leaves that silver as if rain might be expected. Sometimes I'm filled with expectations about the new life I am making, but these moments are inconsistent. Rather, pain anchors me and just when I think I've given name to this sorrow it shows up donned in some new garb. 

Yesterday, it was the unexpected Yes song, "And You and I" that came on the radio. It wasn't just the song that stirred a deep unease. It was also the memory of hearing Rob talk about the purity of Jon Anderson's voice and as I remembered I was transported back to the townhouse we shared in Fort Lee nearly 30 years ago and I could still feel the warmth of sunlight which filtered each morning through the windows in the room where we each wrote. There, we could see the very tip to the George Washington Bridge and what I see mostly is how impossibly young we were. 

Two days ago, I was at home when the phone rang. On the other end of the line was an art therapist I had met when Rob was in Morristown Hospital. She was phoning to return art work Rob had made in January and she asked to speak with him. Whereas I can now write that Rob died without erasing it, getting my voice to utter the same phrase destroys me. My breath gives out.  It is these types of surprises that trigger the understanding of what absence feels like. My Rob is no longer here. Today it was an unmarked envelope that came addressed to me in the mail.  I opened it and found Rob's art that he had made while on the oncology floor of the hospital that the art therapist had returned.

II.

Profound sorrow is bone deep and terribly known.  Earlier this morning I was reading Bonnie's latest letter to her husband, Tuvia and her words helped me to realize that it is the familiar that is so difficult to contend with when the one you love is gone so permanently. The familiar foregrounds the absence, the tragedy. The field shifts. And most everything is unsteady. And here's the thing: there's no place to hide.  There's no way out of this.  There is only living each day, each moment. Trying to make sense of the the senseless.

III.

Tonight I'm thinking about safety and pain and desire and the way sunlight moves across carpet when I come across the Rilke poem, "Entrance."  He writes:

Entrance 

by Rainer Maria Rilke

Whovever you are: step out in to the evening  

out of your living room, where everything is so known; 

your house stands as the last thing before great space: 

Whoever you are. 

With your eyes, which in their fatigue can just barely  

free themselves from the worn-out thresholds, 

very slowly, lift a single black tree  

and place it against the sky, slender and alone.  

With this you have made the world. And it is large  

and like a word that is still ripening in silence.  

And, just as your will grasps their meaning,  

they in turn will let go, delicately, of your eyes . . .

Rilke's words remind me of the tenuousness of safety and how in many ways my house--this home I made with Rob "stands as the last thing before great space."  Rob told me to live brilliantly after his death and I suspect doing so will require me to walk out beyond the borders of home into unmarked, unnamed space. 

I'll get there. Just not tonight.  For now, the weight of the wedding band Rob placed on my finger so many years ago, feels right. Necessary. 

#SOL16: Out Rowing

from my art journal, 5.30.16 (gesso, archival ink, acrylic paint, stabilo pencil)

I.

I could not know how difficult the change of season would be. Summer arrived in the Northeast last week--calendars be damned--and it found me gathering all of Rob's clothing, save the few pieces I simply could not bear to part with, and donating the lot. Next week I may pack some boxes of books and find a place to donate these too. The first part of acting is thinking.

Throughout the spring, I have relentlessly planted and today I noticed how brilliantly red the geraniums that grace the front stoop are and how lush the lavender and cilantro have grown. Since Rob's death, I have kept an art journal. I paint most days and I find it eases a restlessness I find hard to name.

Yesterday, my brother replaced the railings on the back deck that had warped this last winter and every day for the last 90, rain or not, I have walked. All this setting to rights, all this order-making is a slim attempt to tidy this mess.

Each morning, I collect the New York Times from the driveway. Each evening I sweep the front stoop and with it--bits of my heart.


II.

The things we accumulate across an abbreviated life are mostly just things--they are rarely stories. Stories are what happen between and among people.

I once had a man I loved and he died. He did so unexpectedly. He did so early. 

Stories happen when the weight of loss grows so heavy that we unmoor what anchors us most and finally find the breath we need to speak.

This is me speaking. Can you hear me? I once had a man I loved.

Grief is the repetition of loss.


III.

Some mornings as I walk I watch the men steer their rowboats to the best places on the lake for fishing. I watch as they row each day. Unperturbed by measures of success, they row.

I walk by the shore and I find myself thinking of Anne Sexton who years ago before she took her very life wrote about the awful rowing to God--the blisters on the hands that heal and break. And I think, Yes, that's how I feel many days: Healed and broken. Healed and broken. 

To bear this loss against the current is to know that grief has a weight that cannot be calculated. To bear this loss with grace is to know that weight and to still keep rowing.

#SOL16: Brisket

Self Portrait: Lips (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

I.

I bought a brisket.

A few days before Rob was released from the palliative care center of the hospital, I went to Kings Supermarket in Morristown, NJ and bought a 4-pound beef brisket. I had never cooked a brisket before. In fact, I'm not even sure I ever ate brisket. But on the night of Valentine's Day as the threat of snow and ice came true, my husband told me how much he craved brisket. I was able to get him some cooked brisket that night from Kings and swore I would make him brisket when he came home.  So, the next day I had the rather heavy hunk of beef wrapped, not in freezer wrapping with its shiny waxed paper, but in the regular oatmeal-colored butcher paper as I intended to make brisket during Rob's first week back home. While at the supermarket, I also bought all of his favorite foods and carted the many bags of groceries to the car and then to our house. My husband was coming home after having lived in the hospital for the previous 50 days. He left the morning of December 30th by ambulance.  It was mid February and he was coming home to die.  I realize now, months later, that I believed more in the possibility of a miracle than in the certainty of his death. Surely God would intercede and save this man.

II.

The brisket is now probably freezer burned. I placed it there, in the freezer out in the garage the fourth day Rob was home as he had stopped eating. I spent the next two weeks eating mostly orange wedges as I watched my husband prepare himself to die. It seemed orange slices were what I could best swallow. Each morning I peeled an orange and left it in a bowl on the counter.  And throughout the day, I would take a bite now and then.  After months of seeing to his care, I was told that I now needed to shift from life saving to comfort. The fine people from Hospice helped me to understand this, but what they did not know, what I did not know, was that secretly I was still waiting for a miracle.

It took a few days more before I gave up placing the oxygen indicator on Rob's finger. The drone and bang of the oxygen machine filled the pockets of silence.  Next to the hospital bed in our family room were three pulse oximeters. We had three in case one might break and another might be lost. Throughout Rob's fight with cancer, it seemed the measure of his health was directly tied to how high his oxygen saturation numbers were. Above 90 was reason to cheer.  Like the brisket, the oximeters seem to have gone missing as well.

What gets lost is sometimes too much to count.

#SOL16: Secret Desire

from my art journal  - A Change in the Order of Things - May 27, 2016
(gesso, acrylic paint, white and black marker, newspaper, Magritte's writing)

"What echoes in me is what I learn with my body: something sharp and tenuous suddenly wakens this body, which meanwhile had languished in the rational knowledge of a general situation: the word, the image, the thought function like a whiplash." - Roland Barthes, A Lover's Discourse: Fragments, p. 200.

I.

In the dream you are still alive. And although I can see you, I cannot hear you. There is some type of screen between us, a boundary preventing me from reaching out and touching you. The distance keeps me from getting your attention, from saying to you, "Turn around. Speak louder, I cannot hear you."

The dream is a loop that plays the same few frames of film repeatedly.

It is daylight. Bright noon sun. You are sitting on a dock and water surrounds you on three sides. Your head is thrown back and I watch as your shoulders lift and then fall. Lift and fall. And your movement shows me what I cannot hear: You are laughing.

And I think, how familiar. You were always laughing.


II.

The last few hours of your life are so permanently etched in my mind and I have replayed your death over and over again these last three months. I have replayed your death while waiting for coffee to arrive.  While standing in line at the Stop & Shop.  While waiting for Devon to come out from school.  While walking. While falling into meditation. I see your death again and again like a loop I have no will to stop.  The grief counselor I see suggests that I may have a touch of PTSD. And I think she may be right. For what I see again and again is all so clear.

On that unseasonably warm March afternoon with the winter sun falling quickly below the tree line, I watched you die. I held your hand as your jaw loosened, unhinged itself, like a wild bird finally un-trapped. How hard your body worked to die. You were a starling finally given flight. Loosed from the world, a wild thing--I held your hand between both of mine, murmuring sounds of love until I felt your body give way, like daylight to night.

Unmoored, you moved to where I could not follow.The quick fluttering of wings between tree branches.


III.

That which is repeated is its own kind of wonder. This week, the dream comes most nights and I think I must finally be sleeping deeply enough to dream. There in that quasi-twilight before morning fully comes, the birds chirp and chatter call me from the deepness of sleep and I hang on to the bits of what I have been dreaming.

You are still alive. There is a dock. Lake water. I know more than I can say. I hear the water as it moves against the dock, moves against the shore--a lapping sound and behind me there are birds on the wires waiting to lift and I hear the sharp whistling sound of mourning doves as they first find flight.

It is high noon. The sun's warmth against my skin finds me drowsy. You sit on the wood planks, your back is to me. I want to call out to you to turn around, but my voice is mute. I know more than I can say as I watch as your head--tossed back and then forward and then back again and again. I remember that afternoon as we sat in your car so many decades ago and you explained the significance of a möbius strip. And I think now about your death about that one boundary between us.

The flannel shirt, the blue buffalo patterned one you always loved, now pulls at the shoulders each time you laugh, each time your head falls forward. I think how strange to see you in that shirt.  I want to tell you that earlier in the week I donated all of your clothes and kept two of your flannel shirts to wear--and one is the shirt you are wearing.


IV.

When I wake, I look for you and see I am in bed, alone. I turn towards the windows and the sun leaks through the closed blinds, lightening the walls. Daylight has come and now early morning finds the walls a soft rose. I retell the dream and wonder, What does it all mean? What is its significance? What might it signify?

But I am still sleepy and these questions not for a Sunday morning when feeling drowsy feels right. Beside the bed is a book of poems you gave me. I find my reading glasses and then open to a folded page you must have turned down at some earlier time. It pleases me to think of your fingers touching the page I am now touching--your eyes reading the words I am reading--your voice sounding the poem as my voice does too.

You have woken up late,

lost and perplexed

but don't rush to your books

looking for knowledge.

Pick up the flute instead and

let your heart play.

 (by Rumi, from Hidden Music, p. 158)

And I wonder if you have left this page folded for me to find.


V.

Outside, the birds call more insistently to one another. I wish I knew what they were saying. I wish I talked bird. I smile thinking how you too would have liked to speak such language. And laughing at the folly of such foolish things, I say after this year we have each earned a boon.

So, here's a secret for a Sunday morning.

Since your death, I have wanted to commune with you again, to boldly smash through that screen that separates us, and turn on its head the order of things as we have known it. Foucault was right. The order is arbitrary, Capricious, even.

Let's talk through dreams. Let's let this dream keep me company as I ready to walk. The dream replays like a song known for a long, long time. A familiar tune I can hum.

It plays upon my heart like a lover, slowly awakening this body.