#SOL16: Bone and Heart

Devon sitting on the steps (2003)

I.


The second step from the top creaks. It seems hard to miss that step and as such it is now a familiar sound. A comforting sound. This has always been more home than house, faulty in its grace.

Only Rob, Dev and I have ever lived here. The house was new when we bought. Others that spring would outbid us and yet  Dave, the builder, sold it to us anyway. I'd like to think that he knew we were at our limit and that we would make this place he built a home. And we have.

We gave rise to that creak. We made it climbing up and down these stairs for the last 14 years. Bounding down and trudging up ladened with books and boxes and laundry and more times than I could count, the sleeping weight of a toddler. Time has loosened these stairs--caused the wooden treads to rub against the risers and stringers; to grind against the screws and nails that hold it all together.  And how odd it is that such a noise could be more solace than annoyance; more balm than pain?


II.


Rob climbed those stairs a year ago for the last time this month. He was unsteady on his feet and the climb up those stairs became too much for him to accomplish. We each did our best to not notice his unsteady and too heavy gait. We wanted it to be something temporary. We told one another how this set back would resolve itself with treatment. To pay note would have shifted the narrative from ever so hopeful to less so. And truly that bit of hope we held on to was more gift than not--more necessary than any pseudo cure the legion of doctors would prescribe and (un)prescribe.

On that last day he climbed the stairs, I washed him, washed his hair and we laughed at my clumsy attempts that morning. And how good it felt to laugh. He needed to sit  halfway through as holding his too-sick body up was too much to bear.  He could no longer manage such things. Even shaving become a chore and though I gave it a good try, he would take the razor from my hand and redo my first attempt. We were getting ready for what would be his first chemo treatment, as he had been cleared by the infectious disease doctor after five weeks of fighting a staph infection to finally receive treatment--treatment that would only land him back in the hospital in need of emergency thoracic surgery a week later. As the chemo stripped his body's defenses, the staph resurged growing into an abscess a millimeter from the right ventricle of his heart.

Rob would never see the second floor of our home again. Never walk up our stairs to our bedroom. Never sit in his favorite chair in the guest room which was more his study than not. Imagine that just seven weeks earlier he went up and down those stairs without a care. We each did.


III.


Late at night I listen, listen to welcome him home, as if his departed spiritual self might bear some weight when all things grow dark and the barriers between here and there grow thin. In the dark anything can happen, anything can be. Now and then I hear the tread of my now six-foot son take those stairs two at at a time well after midnight. He is in search of a glass of water, a glass of juice--and it will be the empty glass I find sitting in the sink the next morning that confirms this late night tale.

On his way up the stairs to his bedroom, I hear the creak and I think of Rob. I think how this home we made is part bone, part heart.

#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: His Flannel Shirt

Rob and Max in Maine

I must force myself to look upon the familiar things, the coat hanging on the chair, the hat in the hall… To ease the pain I took over some of his things for myself. I wore his shirts, sat at his writing desk, used his pens to acknowledge the hundreds of letters of condolence; and by the very process of identification with the objects he had touched, felt the closer to him. —Daphne du Maurier 

I.

I decided to pack Rob's shoes this afternoon. Devon helped and one pair of cowboy boots and an odd slipper that we both agreed Rob would not have liked were left when we finished. I asked Devon to put the cowboy boots in the bag with other pairs of shoes and I threw the slipper away. Rob purchased the Lucchese handmade boots on a business trip we made to San Antonio--a year or so before we married.

I was surprised when Rob returned to our hotel room from an afternoon with some other men attending the conference and showed me the boots.
"You're from Brooklyn. You work in Hell's Kitchen. Cowboy boots?"
He looked at the boots and then me and then at the boots again before he explained how his father and Buddy had gotten boots. "I may have gotten carried away," he told me, laughing at his own folly.


II.

As I write this I am wearing one of Rob's flannel shirts--a Campbell plaid, I think. At first, Rob would get annoyed when I took one of his shirts to wear. This surprised me.

"You have shirts of your own," he said to me.
"It makes me feel wrapped up in you," I explained and he looked surprised at first and it wouldn't be until much later--years later--that I realized how this gesture of love baffled him. He hadn't known a lot of love before. Across the decades we helped each other to deepen and complicate our understandings of love.

III.

Friends, well intending, ask, "How are you doing?" Honestly, I have no clear response as the sadness I feel seems to be without limit.  I read there are five stages to grieving: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance (Kubler-Ross). But grief is not about stages. Rather, grief works more like a Klein bottle, fully immersing while being non-orientable. I am still shocked by the illness and death of my husband.

I can recall him last July making a commitment to walk in order to lose some weight.

I can remember him joking with Devon's friends who spent a week with us in August, a mere week before the diagnosis.

And I can still remember him tucking those boots away in the closet of our bedroom and confessing later that they weren't as comfortable as he first thought.

I can remember.