Keith

Dev at 3 in what was then our new home.

I.

I'm leaving where I have lived for the last 18 years. Dev has gone to Hoboken, fallen in love, and I couldn't be more pleased. On my way out to get tape I needed to close some boxes, I stopped to talk with a neighbor, and I thought she said she was returning a rake to Keith.  When I asked her if that's what she meant, she looked at me and said, "You don't know?"

"Know what?"

"Keith died a few weeks ago."

Keith lived next door. He left behind a wife and a 15-year-old daughter.  I was stunned.

II.

The winter after Rob died, a UPS truck driver plowed down my mailbox and left it in pieces.  When I saw what had happened, I felt like crying. I had been holding so many disparate parts of my life together and this insult was just too much.

I said to Dev, "there's only so many things we can fix. Leave it alone and we'll figure it out tomorrow."   Neither of us had any idea how to put it back together. I imagined all day how I would not be getting mail. I fretted and wondered what to do.  After great loss, the body mostly knows paralysis. Even small decisions can be troublesome.

When I got home that night from work, Keith was at the mailbox.  He had just finished assembling it. It has never fallen again.

That's who he was. Quiet. Kind. Watchful.

III.

I've been away from the house a good deal since it was put on the market and now sold.

Four years ago, Rob was still living. He had just been released from the hospital and was cleared for chemo after battling a staph infection he had gotten when a surgeon placed a filthy port into his chest 7 weeks earlier.  Two weeks from now he would suffer heart trauma and undergo thoracic surgery to remove an abscess the staph infection, followed by chemo, had caused. Hours after learning of Keith's death, I was reminded of the sharp pain that never quite heals.

Loss is never far away, even when I think I have tucked it well under my skin.  I imagine most women who have lost their husbands know some of what my neighbor now faces.  I brought a card over to the house and rang the bell. I could hear the dogs barking and the soft sounds of those at home. I wasn't too surprised that the door remained closed. 

After the first shock wears off, facing life is often too hard. I placed the card in her mailbox and left.

IV.

I wish I was wiser. I wish I had the power to heal with just a word or two and I could say or write something here that would ball up  the immense pain my neighbor, Tracy and her daughter, Natalie must feel. But I know that it asking the impossible and the dangerous. Grief works itself out of a body across years. It's patterned and idiosyncratic.  I see that now. 

The pulse to live is biologically strong. It carries the wounded along until we can find our feet and stand once again. Wobbly knees and all that.

V.

Two things mattered most to me after Rob's death and the years that followed.

Art I made after Rib died from his notebooks,

The first was love. My Devon had just turned 17 a few weeks before his dad died. The love I have for Devon kept me strong and vulnerable.  I did not know I would need both.  I did not know in the months after Rob's death that Devon and I would have to break and fall apart. 

We did.  Where there had never been distance--distance grew. Where there had been trust, trust frayed. Yeat's poem about how the center cannot hold was too true.  We had to break to become whole again.

The second was the knowledge that I have been so well loved by Rob. Distance has a way of reframing the ordinary.  It has allowed me to live brilliantly as he asked, and not live in response to fear.  And lord knows there are so many fears that arose alongside the loss.


VI.

"I don't understand it," says Dawn. "I don't understand why good men die early."
I tell her what Jane told me 2 years ago. "You're never going to understand that. That's what acceptance is.  Accepting what you can't understand."

If you find a quiet moment in the next few days, offer a prayer or two for my neighbor and her young daughter that they may find solace in one another.

Then go and live boldly. 
Live brilliantly.
Live.

#SOL16: Love Sounds for My Son

Collage made from Citra Solve papers (M.A. Reilly, July 2016)

I'm pulled from bed this morning with the need to write.  I have been dreaming awake. This post that will take form here began as lines in a dream--words forming first as sound and then whole lines as I was partially awake and now they have become this print. There's a tremendous sadness I feel when I think of my son and the loss of his dad. Dev was one month past his 17th birthday when Rob died. Barely 17. And I think this morning that there will be no father's steady hand to guide him.

This morning fear pulled me from bed.

And make no mistake it is not the fear that Donald Trump spoke about last week. That fear is frankly too pretty--too full of apocalyptic con and slight of hand. The fear Trump railed about is more comic-like, less substance.

The fear that pulled me from bed was fear lodged in my throat. It was fear of what is not now. It was fear in what I imagined might be, in the many instances my son will hurt without his dad there too soothe. And yes, I know I will soothe when I am allowed when I am even knowledgeable, just as I know there already have been days when my touch, my concern, my care was not found nor invited. Some pain is private. There are days when my son's loss finds purchase and steals his breath and I must bear witness. He will fix himself if fixing is needed, but mostly he will endure and add that experience to the emotional chest he has been building since birth.

This is what I can feel. This is what I can endure. This is the taste of sorrow. This is the slash of loss. This beneath it all is love.

And here in the daylight, I wonder if he will be a stronger man as a result of this loss. Will the empathy that comes with losing love, losing a father fuel his drive, his care, his dedication to others? Will his knowledge of other shine, be a beacon of hope?  What trajectories will his life compose?

Mothers know much and nothing.

What I do believe is that love is by invitation. It cannot be forced. Love is more powerful, more constant than fear.

My love for my son is a constant note that sounds below and above the daily actions I take. It sounds even when fear lights like a fuse. Love allows me to know how temporary fear is: a bright light that blazes and then dies as it should, as it must for we are here, living.

Love sounds even when I am blinded
                  by fear and

                              I follow those notes
               
                         a handful
                                 of musical breadcrumbs
                                  tossed from the hands I have known and not,
                                  tossed from my own hands years earlier.

I follow that line of music
                         leaving behind a dense, imposing forest
             
and find myself here
              in morning light,
              the burn of fear left behind--the shroud of a dream alongside it.

Here in a clearing called morning
love has called me from sleep, from fear
and I have answered
with a handful of words.




Afternote:
I wrote this I realized while sitting in Rob's chair and the feel of the music in the writing sounds a lot like Rob's voice. 

#SOL16: Paused Between Two Worlds

Guardians, Too (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. - C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, p. 3.

I.

I expected healing to be a loud a matter--to announce itself.  A trumpet at dawn. A loud crackling, like a fire spreading. Late evening declarations.  But this is not the case.  Healing is more often silent, more of a background to the days that find me floundering, avoiding all things new. 

These floundering days are filled with fear--an expression of grief. The very worse thing I could imagine has happened.  My husband has died. One moment we are planning our lives, saying retirement is a mere decade away and then I am sitting next to him, holding his hand and watching as his breath shortens, as the distance between breaths elongates until he breathes no more. And I recall the overwhelming shock, the loudness of that empty room when his vibrant, beautiful soul left leaving behind a body on a bed. 

But it wasn't only his death that stunned me, left me more hollow than filled.  It was the unrelenting pain, sorrow, dashed hope, and fear that defined his last six months. Yes, we had light times but they were so very rare. Yes, we had hope for Rob was nothing if not a man who believed he would live. Yes we had love for was it not the base definition of us? But each new malady, each botched medical procedure, each unfortunate outcome catapulted us into more and more reacting. 

Less being. 

We were rats in a maze.

II.

My husband died in early March, but he was taken from Devon and me months earlier when staph infections ruled out cancer treatment; when his body no longer strong began to crumple: by the end of December his right leg could not support his weight and became numb from the thigh muscles to the toes and he could no longer stand, let alone walk. He became chair bound and then bed bound. My strong, strong husband could not lift himself out of a chair, a bed.  He suffered through spinal surgery and 9 days of rehab before the last staph infection--the third one in five months--returned him to the emergency room of a hospital.  By the end of January, his mind, his most amazing mind became too clouded from opiates and pain and more opiates and it started to break. He became more there and less here. 

50 consecutive days in hospitals broke him--ended his life well before his last breath. 

III.

What follows in the weeks between Rob's death and now is that my mind seems to be taking the necessary steps to keep me from being harmed so boldly again. Even as the shock has worn, the numbness has faded, I keep a stillness about me that is unhealthy.  

Don't try that. 

Don't go there. 

Don't do that. 

Yet, against all this inactivity is Rob's louder voice, "Don't you dare hide yourself away." He somehow knew, ahead of time, that hiding would be my first response. And yes, I know that such protection keeps me waiting, stalled, suspended if you like between a past life I can no longer access and a new world I must actively make.

I am paused between two worlds.

C.S. Lewis captured this feeling well when he explained that grief feels "...like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen" (p. 33). 

IV.

I thought I was writing for you. I thought I was writing in order to remember Rob. I thought it mattered if you read and took time to respond. And in some small ways it does.  This bearing witness matters some. But I see now that I have been writing mostly for me, mostly to reinvent my life by rehearsing living--to stand in the fear and be vulnerable, to chance being loved.

It isn't fear, but rather sheer vulnerability; It isn't hope, but rather love--that inches this tired and broken self towards light.