#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.

#SOL17: Grey

Me turning to look at Rob while we were on holiday in Montana.

I.

Imagine a grey screen descending--separating you from everything that defines your life.  Can you see it?  Feel it? Life is a perpetual stormy day. When you look from where you are standing what surrounds you, (in)forms you is just a bit duller; less bright. It's as if you were wearing dark sunglasses in the fog.

That is what life feels like 14 months after Rob's death. We are socked in, fuzzy, less clear or lively as we were before--before the diagnosis and staph infections and surgeries and treatments and mishaps and death.


II.

For a moment tonight I imagined what our home would feel like if Rob were alive--if he had not died--if he had somehow beat the cancer and staph infections. Spring would be glorious and we would be taking note of the changes. We would all be so excited with Devon nearing high school graduation and then off to the very college he wanted to attend.  Rob would have applauded Devon's acceptance into Stevens Institute of Technology to study computer engineering. My husband was a science geek at heart. He would have been so proud of his son and so delighted about the course of study Devon would be undertaking. Knowing Rob, he would have wanted to attend as well.

But, we had other plans for that time.


III.

Rob and I were determined to start a new chapter in our marriage when Devon went off to college. Yes, we would feel that empty nest feeling and given our love for our son and how much we enjoy being with him, we would have felt great sadness. But, we also knew that we wanted some time together. Just us. We were together for a decade before adopting Devon.  We wanted some time alone.

During the early stages of Rob's illness (the first few weeks) he told me he wanted to renew our wedding vows--this time with people we loved present. He had even picked out rings. We had talked about taking small trips here and there; seeing America from the side roads, and even after paralysis set in, Rob asked me to research vans that could be driven using hands, not feet. Less than 6 weeks later he would die.

Our initial plan as we continued to work together in our company, was to spend a week out of every month traveling. We knew we could organize work so that we had a week to play most every month. Now that cannot happen, will not happen. And nothing I say here or do can change that ending.


IV.

Everything these days is less shiny.  Some moments, I miss my husband more than all the words I know can express. When do you think I will feel like I am fully living? When do you think the grey will grow thin and transparent?

#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: 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.