8 Years

At the Paterson Falls (acrylic, ink, pencil, papers)

Yesterday I photographed at the Paterson Falls. After all of the tumultuous storms we’ve been having, the falls were powerful, awe-inspiring. Being in Paterson, once again, had me remembering William Carlos Williams’ Paterson. I first read it in its entirety with Rob. Prior to that (like Joyce’s Ulysses) I read parts. Rob loved to read aloud and what I recall most about Paterson was hearing so much of the book. I went back to see if I could find a section that was in mind, but not recalled with fidelity. 

No defeat is made up entirely of defeat—since
the world it opens is always a place
              formerly
                               unsuspected. A
world lost,
              a world unsuspected,
                               beckons to new places
and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory
of whiteness     .

8 years ago today, Rob died. I will tell you that I never imagined what 8 years out might feel like. During those beginning years, placing one foot in front of the other took effort. The lines from Williams quoted here (from The Descent), remind me that in great loss, there is the possibility for new spaces to open up, in part because of the holes left by grief and loss, in part because the pulse to live is so very strong. At the falls yesterday, I thought of how some slim memories endure, while the greater majority of living and remembering the last 8 years flow with a force not too dissimilar to those falls after much rain.

2.10.2016

Edges (Nome, Alaska)

The days get muddled together when I recall. 8 years is a long time in many ways especially when I think of all the living that has happened from then to now.  On this past Saturday, I would remember the hospital room, the quietness of the floor so early in the morning, the oncologist. I would recall all of this and more, almost to the minute. 

5 a.m. and the interstate was more abandoned than not. A lone truck in the far right lane. It’s light cutting through the still darkness. By 6 a.m., I had coffee in hand for both of us and was making my way upstairs to the 3rd? or was it the 4th floor of the hospital?  Three hours later the oncologist who was supposed to be away surprised us. I don’t recall his exact words, but he said something about consulting with his partners, a cat scan, spread, and how Rob who only a few weeks earlier had a prognosis of at least another year of life, was now terminal. Less than 4 weeks, he would be dead. 

This past Saturday, I was sipping a second cup of coffee when the date hit me. February 10. 9 a.m.  I had come home from a client the afternoon before suddenly feeling miserable, certain I had caught a bug. Sore throat, achy, headache behind the eyes. The body knows what consciousness cannot always grasp. I went to sleep early, waking Saturday morning and feeling off. And then I remembered. That is what grief is. Years can pass and in the space of an ordinary day, a sip of coffee, a date and time , and 

     the knees 

fall out from under.

Ambiguous Loss: 6 Years Later

A page from a working art journal (12/21)

I had not understood the implications of the quick loss of love—how the suddenness and permanence of such loss make life unsteady.  It took the last 6 years to understand the implications of the fear that arose when Rob got sick so quickly and died so young.  If such tragedy could strike at will, what shoreline could I count on to anchor me? During the first year after his death, I felt untethered to the earth. I could not see a future. My very definition of self that was formed and entwined with Rob felt shattered, missing. I knew I remained a parent, but even that was altered as I was now a single parent. Even though I could think about what Rob might say when a situation arose, I knew in the bones, he was gone. 

In a recent NY Times Magazine article,  “What if There’s No Such Thing as Closure?” writer, Meg Bernhard, writes about Pauline Boss and her theory of ambiguous loss. I first began reading about ambiguous loss in 2016, after listening to Krista Tippet’s interview with Boss. Bernhard contrasts the traditional Elizabeth Kubler-Ross model of loss with Boss’s theory.  She writes, 

“…Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s linear “five stages of grief” model — which implies that if we work hard enough and follow certain steps, we’ll be able to get over our losses within a reasonable timeline — remains a popular mode of thinking. But Boss argues that many losses do not follow such models, and our reliance on them does not equip us to cope. 

By contrast, ambiguous loss gives us a term with which to acknowledge the amorphous nature of its emotional wounding. People are able to identify with this type of loss when they have language for it. Rejecting linear models, Boss offers six nonsequential guidelines meant to help people bear their grief: making meaning out of loss; relinquishing one’s desire to control an uncontrollable situation; recreating identity after loss; becoming accustomed to ambivalent feelings; redefining one’s relationship with whatever or whomever they’ve lost; and finding new hope…”

I have experienced all six nonsequential facets of grief these last few years, moving among, between and dwelling within the different facets. These six guidelines have informed my life:

• making meaning out of loss; 
• relinquishing one’s desire to control an uncontrollable situation; 
• recreating identity after loss; 
• becoming accustomed to ambivalent feelings; 
• redefining one’s relationship with whatever or whomever they’ve lost; and 
• finding new hope.

What arises now is how my understanding of each guideline has deepened, changed, been forgotten and remembered.  Hope is no longer an end moment to get to, but rather a placeholder of possibilities that winds like a cat between the others. It is not separate from becoming use to ambivalence and uncertainty, nor of forming definitions of self, or relinquishing control, or finding tentative meaning. What is new to me is the redefinition of my relationship with my husband.  The passing of time shows me how I have continued to lived—to thrive, not merely survive. This knowledge allows me to see the distance between my life with Rob and my life now.  I have continued to evolve. 

The imperative to live, or as Rob told me after learning his life was ending, live brilliantly, is more constant than not these days.I am far more independent than I was previously as well. 

Trauma-Informed Writing: Why Writing through Grief and Other Trauma Matters

Watercolor, Reilly, 2017.

I.

I open a recent issue of JAAL and the first article, "Humanizing the Practice of Witnessing Trauma Narratives," by Rossina Zamora Liu has me thinking about the partial stories I heard by Board of Education members a previous night. Several were recounting  time spent with young girls in high school who have experienced trauma.  There were large spaces in the retold stories; partial expressions of what remains unknown, unspoken. How to get told the stories that must be told is a salient question.

Liu (2019) who founded and facilitated the Community Stories Writing Workshop (CSWW), at a local shelter house explains that through personalized correspondence, she helps "writers negotiate the layers of vulnerabilities that come with revisiting painful memories." (p. 347).  She says she does so with the "hope to illuminate the importance of recognizing writers’ emotional labor as a humanizing practice of witnessing (Paris & Winn, 2014) trauma narratives and how we, as writing teachers, might reposition ourselves from that of presumed authorities on writing to that of “worthy witnessing” (Winn & Ubiles, 2011, p. 296) of writers’ drafts—if they grant us admission" (p. 347). Each week homeless adults gather for 90-minutes at the center to write.

Reading the article,  thinking about the recent conversations, as well as the thousands of pages I wrote in the months leading to my husband's death and the years that have followed, I wonder how we might leverage writing workshop for trauma-informed work.

II.

Stories have always mattered. Telling stories in the months after Rob died surely kept me grounded as it afforded me a process to work through the terror and then the sadness of grief.  Liu succinctly states, "Writing helps us uncover our past, labor with it, and move toward other possibilities" (p. 347). For  me it was part word, part image that helped. Creating helped me to make sense of what was largely inexplicable.

How might we afford the gift of expression to young girls at high schools? What might that process look and sound like?  

Live to the Point of Tears

I.

Tree Lines (M.A. Reilly, acrylic paint, gesso, citra-solv)

"Honesty is reached through the doorway of grief and loss," writes David Whyte in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words. "Honesty is not found in revealing the truth, but in understanding how deeply afraid of it we are. To become honest is in effect to become fully and robustly incarnated into powerlessness."

Loss brings the opportunity for honesty, in part because it allows us to know in our bones that powerlessness is unavoidable. Four years ago, most everything I thought I knew to be true became opaque, less clear and the world more topsy-turvy.  By mid-September, 2015, we had seen the oncologist, learned Rob had stage 4 lung cancer, and Rob had scheduled his first chemotherapy session for later in the month.  What we did not know at that moment was that a week earlier a surgeon had placed an infected port into my husband's chest and altered any chance at life he might have had.

I was reminded of all of that and the five months that followed when I received an email from a friend on the West coast last night. When I opened it what first caught my attention was that new email was written in response to an email I had sent 3 years and 7 months earlier, explaining that Rob had died. This caught me unaware.

Loss does not leave a body.  It carries a breath-stealing punch that surfaces without any self-will. It rises full force stirring the acid in the gut, the heart.

A wolf to the throat.


II.

In the trail of emails back and forth, I read the new message: the mother of a friend of Dev's from childhood had died. Agnes Kurdyla Lauria was just 48.


III.

After Rob died I found myself paying attention to death notices as if some insights I so desperately wanted could be fathomed through the loss of another.  The year Rob died, so too did David Bowie, who lived 9 years more than Rob. I measured every one's death by the plus or minus of years from when Rob's life ended.  I did this automatically, without thought. The way I organized time was redefined.

This morning I am wondering once again why good people die. This is not productive thinking and I know that, but nonetheless the thoughts rise and with them come the unknowable, the unanswerable. Agnes, like Rob, was a beloved teacher. I can recall when she first was hired as a basic skills teacher and the many conversation we had while waiting for or collecting our children from school or a sleepover.  Her child, Alex, like mine is just 20-years-old.

How could two sweet children each lose a parent so early in their lives? 


IV.

Perhaps asking, "Why do good people die early?" is a place holder for a more important observation.  Whyte explains:

The French philosopher Camus used to tell himself quietly to live to the point of tears, not as a call for maudlin sentimentality, but as an invitation to the deep privilege of belonging and the way belonging affects us, shapes us and breaks our heart at a fundamental level. It is a fundamental dynamic of human incarnation to be moved by what we feel, as if surprised by the actuality and privilege of love and affection and its possible loss. Courage is what love looks like when tested by the simple everyday necessities of being alive.

Life happens whether we have a hand in designing it or not.  Each breath that breaks tells us we belong.

Nostalgia

Once at Grand Central (M.A. Reilly)

I. 

"Hun? Could you read your section of the paper and let me read mine?" I ask Rob hoping he'll stop reading aloud.

    

"Ok. Ok," he answers. He takes a sip of coffee and returns his eyes to the page. A few minutes later I hear him say, "You have to hear this..."

Even though a bulk of the Sunday NewYork Times arrived along with Saturday's paper, we tended to save it all for Sunday morning. Rob would inevitably read aloud whole articles and though I would grumble some Sundays, the truth we each knew was that I loved to hear him read and he did so often. 

II. 

David Whyte in Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words explains nostalgia:

Nostalgia is not indulgence. Nostalgia tells us we are in the presence of imminent revelation, about to break through the present structures held together by the way we have remembered: something we thought we understood but that we are now about to fully understand, something already lived but not fully lived, issuing not from our future but from something already experienced; something that was important, but something to which we did not grant importance enough, something now wanting to be lived again, at the depth to which it first invited us but which we originally refused. Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end.

I read this and pause, knowing that the writing today--this story of a Sunday morning newspaper reading is wrapped in nostalgia. It is bringing me somewhere I haven't named before and that is part pain and part gift, but they are not equal.


III. 

I realize this morning that I want grief to be a simple math problem I can solve. I write in the margin of a book I shared with Rob: 

1 sorrow is negated by 1 remembrance of love.  

I know this is not always a truth. I reread Whyte's words, halting a bit to reread: 

"Nostalgia is not an immersion in the past, nostalgia is the first annunciation that the past as we know it is coming to an end."

Grieving is less about time passing and more about grace--about accepting how the past as I knew it, is no more. I don't think I could have known that 3 years ago.  There's a thoroughness with which I remember these days. Those bits of recalled stories, some days, lead to new understandings. 


IV.

Rob told me years ago the only way out of something is through it. The last few weeks I have been in tune with the immense loss, the life I am making now, and the changes Dev and I have been through. 

After Rob died:

We had to break. We had to break apart. We had no center to hold.We had to break and then begin to heal. 

To be whole again we needed to break. Not just ourselves, but also what was between us.

As I remember once again, I note the many triggers that bring me back to Rob just the last three days: 

a lecture I attended on Friday, the notice that Lawrence Lessig is speaking nearby soon, a quiet meal a few blocks from where Rob worked in Hell's Kitchen, the way the light slants in the weeks before spring officially arrives, the noise of birds who have return to build nests, the smell of coffee, a man reading softly to the woman next to him on the train--their heads tilted towards one another, the sound of a hearty laugh, a song we loved that comes on the radio, a couple holding hands, a father and son,most everything Dev does.

V.

I read the paper online now--even Sunday's. 

This morning, I miss the smell of ink from the magazine section, the weight of the book review, and the sound of Rob reading aloud.  

#SOL18: After Great Loss Comes Acceptance

Moon Over Field (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

For the first 18 months I was very, very careful. It wasn’t as if I understood the care I took. Rather, it was something that felt essential.  I lived by some adages those first months after Rob's death:

Ensure Devon is well protected, well loved.
Stay healthy.
Minimize risk.
Avoid drama.
Be positive.
Fill life with what is most good. 

I avoided mishaps as best I could because each problem felt so devastating regardless of the problem's actual weight. After such a loss, the smallest concern would derail me. There’s a vulnerability to being sick, to having problems that exacerbated my sense of loneliness.  Each sniffle, cold, or disappointment triggered a feeling of loss. In the aftermath of great loss, life is more tenuous than reliable.

Like water through splayed fingers, that protection slipped greatly these last six months. Acceptance took hold even when it did not announce itself. It came after a challenging fall when I had been sick much of October, November and December with blinding headaches, congestion, and difficulty breathing. I had been seen by an ENT, suffered through a lung x-ray to rule out lung cancer, and swallowed several rounds of steroids and antibiotics that failed to even temporarily fix the sinus infection. It wasn’t until the second ENT said, “Something isn’t right. I want you to take the medicine I’m prescribing and after you finish it, get a CT-scan. Something is causing this infection to resurge.” A day after the scan the doctor phoned and told me there were no blockages and that he thought the source of the infection was an abscess tooth.

“My tooth?”
“I’m not a dentist so I can’t say for sure. But it does look like that on the films. Upper right.”
“I have a tender tooth there. I figured that was because of the sinus infection.”
“When were you last to the dentist?”
“Six months ago. I had a full set of x-rays, no cavities and my teeth were cleaned. I guess I need to make an appointment.”
“Yes, as soon as you can. I’ll have the office put aside your films so you can bring them to your dentist. Let me know what happens.”

A week later my dentist confirmed the abscess and a week after that I had root canal. I returned to the ENT who confirmed the infection was still present and he prescribed more antibiotics and a steroid and told me to come back in two weeks. I returned to have another CT-scan and was able to see the extraordinary difference between the first set of films and the second.

I cried easily those three months, missing Rob deeply. I tended to isolate myself at first because I felt miserable and then because the isolation felt like comfort. What I did not know was I was saying goodbye once again to my husband.  By the second year, Rob was more memory than body.  He was removed from my day-to-day life.  Life resettled and hope once again felt palpable. Acceptance wasn't a decision as I first thought. It was more a process that arose in time.

That adage about time healing all wounds feels wiser these days.

#SOL17: What Sorrow Reveals

An Offering (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

I thought grief was an experience to move through, like a figure walking through calendar pages amassing new understandings that would ease and redefine the pain. Grief does not yield to time as I first thought. It is impervious to calendars as it has never been a linear matter. Rather,  grief is more fluid, less borderlands. It unfolds and refolds new landscape and old triggers revealing what was cherished, forgotten, lost, and remembered. It is both sweet and bitter.

Most everything animate is a trigger. A couple out walking. The call of birds from trees. The rustle of wind through leaves. The change of seasons. The random mention of John Cage on a radio show. Most everything inanimate is a trigger too. Every read book in a house built from books. The creak of a stair. A found post it note wedged in the back of a drawer. The forty journals left behind. The brush used to lather when shaving. The anticipation that still arrives with Friday evenings.  Habit is the largest trigger.

There has not been a day since Rob's death when some recollection has risen sharply and reminded me of what Rob can no longer experience. Life pulses on. Perhaps that has been the hardest to accept--the grand indifference of life and this understanding of how life presses on has allowed me a few insights.

1. Feelings are not truths, nor are they doors into the future. They are quick moments of the present that tell me: I will not die from this loss regardless of the sharp awareness that still happens when the enormity of the loss swamps me. Time does not avert the flood of feeling, although it does reduce its duration.
2. Acceptance is a choice and perhaps more importantly, a practice. Each matters. Choosing to accept Rob's death is also choosing to accept responsibility for my life. Practice at each is often far more deliberate than how I lived previously. 
3. In the span of five months,  life as I knew changed dramatically. Loss like this can happen again. The best antidote to such uncertainty is to live and love deliberately, beginning with my son. 
4. Love remains solid, informing after Rob's death. Love did not die. Knowing I have been so well loved centers me each day. Rob's love continues in the absence of his corporeal self. I remain the most loved person on this planet as I carry with me the love that formed me. I did not know that such a gift would be revealed as sorrow edged.

SOL17: The Play Set

Sing to Me (M.A. Reilly, 2017, acrylic, watercolor, pencil, gesso, digital remix)

I.

It takes a little more than ten minutes to play Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings and it may well be the saddest and most glorious music I have ever heard. It's best reserved for days that are cloudy, threatening rain. I was listening to the piece two weeks ago when my oldest brother showed up, sawzall in hand, and said he would take the play set apart. I had mentioned the previous week wanting to take it down as I readied the house for sale. It took Jack, Devon and I most of that day to take apart the large wooden play set.

Imagine hearing Barber's music and you'd have a fair representation of how I felt after the play set had been sawed apart.

II.

We moved the pieces to a new location on the lawn: the small slide that used to fit Devon's body just right, the two benches and table where we ate peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch, the climbing bars Devon would swing from, the two swings Rob and I sat on moving back and forth as Devon commanded his world from the top of the set behind the acrylic bubble. Later that day after Jack left for home and Devon went upstairs I called a junk remover and set a date for these bits and pieces of my life to be taken away.

Now it is gone and the space left behind is large, looming, and mostly just empty.

III.

Rob and I bought that large wooden play set when Devon was four-years-old and money was more scarce then not. One Saturday afternoon we watched from the deck as men assembled the set in the rear yard. We had moved into the new house the previous year and for the last fourteen years it has sat like a sentry in a corner of the rear yard.

Some days, Rob's death hurts in ways hard to name for somehow in the sting of all of that pain, time somehow moved on.

#SOL17: Birds Sung to Me

Night, I (M.A. Reilly, 2008)

"On starless nights, one can feel like a loose array of limbs and purpose, and seem smaller, limited to what one can touch."   ― from Diane Ackerman's  "Dawn Light: Dancing with Cranes and Other Ways to Start the Day"

I. 

It was time to let go of our house where light fell through familiar windows and each creak of the staircase I knew by heart. It was time to pack away all that could not be carried further. Such cargo weighed too much and I carried it too far. Some truths took greater time to surface. Sea deep. They resided where sunlight did not penetrate. Oceanographers called this the bathypekagic zone. Poets knew it as the midnight zone. I, like every other widow, simply called it the blue-black absence of love. 

Across the last two years, grief remained a spiraling affair.  At times a darkness rose up to reclaim and then release me. Claimed and released over and over and somehow each time the sudden pain of it stunned me. The center I once knew by heart was blown wide open after Rob died making it hard to find my balance in the dark.

II.

And yet, I stood 
          at the open window tonight
                               where the fall of late light
                               felt familiar,
                                      memories remained bittersweet,
                                       and the sharp desire to be still
                                       pressed against a need to move.  
                                       
Grief was a tension
that rose between then and next
leaving me only a slim truth:
Rob was dead and I was not.

Outside the window
           a pair of cardinals settled
                      on the limb of a bare tree
                 just beyond my reach
                 and sung to me.

As I listened even the darkness felt warm.

#SOL17: Why I Paint

Mountain Landscape (Reilly, 2016)

A FEW YEARS AGO, I heard a wonderful story, which I’m very fond of telling. An elementary school teacher was giving a drawing class to a group of six-year-old children. At the back of the classroom sat a little girl who normally didn’t pay much attention in school. In the drawing class she did. For more than twenty minutes, the girl sat with her arms curled around her paper, totally absorbed in what she was doing. The teacher found this fascinating. Eventually, she asked the girl what she was drawing. Without looking up, the girl said, “I’m drawing a picture of God.” Surprised, the teacher said, “But nobody knows what God looks like.” The girl said, “They will in a minute.”  from Ken Robinson, The Element, p. 11.

I.

These days I mostly paint. Maybe, like the girl in the story Ken Robinson tells it is to represent God, to author. Maybe painting defies such cause and effect. I blessedly don't know. Some mornings as I stand with a paintbrush in hand, I wonder what my husband would have made of this compulsion. Painting is an in-the-middle type of work (highly rhizomatic) and a  mostly solitary expression. Seeing something arise out of the paint loosens the grip of grief even as it reveals it and deepens my will to live.

I dream about painting. Asleep I seem to be working out problems of space and intention. Rehearsing variations. I feel the paint move beneath my brush and stain my hands. After such loss that is redefined by each new moment, creating is a form of grace. So too is saying yes. Frankly, I indulge myself and I am unapologetic. I have traded earning money for time to paint and I am the better for it and just a bit poorer. Unlike Thoreau, I have more chairs in my home than I could sit on in a given night or week. Im the last 18 months, I have reclaimed the dining room and now it is filled with tubes and pots of paint, gesso, journals, brushes, pencils, and a crock pot.


II.

Somedays I fear I am more Grasshopper than industrious Ant.  But after Rob's death, I mostly know what is important and what could easily be forgotten. If you were to visit  tomorrow you might see a half dozen journals spread across the dining room table in various stages of drying. Some pages might look abstract, while others might display more recognizable images. A hand opening. A woman's face in profile. A murder of crows lifting out of an eye. I paint to tell myself what my words can't seem to convey. Painting loosens what I tacitly know and gives it a temporary voice that remains uncoded.  I paint out of curiousity.

Often my intention when painting is to become better at it and also to have those very frustrating days when nothing my hand touches matches my intention--when painting mostly sucks. I paint to forsake technique, to forget intention and open myself to possibility. Painting reminds me that I can still be surprised.

III.

Some mornings, it is the sheer messiness of it that I love best--that and how meaning sometimes emerges along the length of a line, within the swell of a shape, in conflict with space or tone, and often in homage to color. I must confess that I have loved Mark Rothko since I was a young girl. For every codification I make to explain what it means to paint,

                           the next day,
    hour,

                                               minute                           finds the exception

    and returns me to
                                      a lovely stream

                     
                                                                              where the banks

                         are less certain,

                   the flow less contained,

                                     and Gödel (not God)

is in the house.

#SOL17: Transforming Heart Ache through Art: 18 Months of Journaling with Paint

Dreaming. (watercolor, digital remix, August 18, 2017, about 3 a.m., Molskine journal)

For the last 18 months I have been painting in art journals--some purchased, some made by hand. It hasn't exactly been practice, as practice connotes an end game and somehow the drawing and painting I have been doing was more elemental, more necessary. There was no prescribed end in mind. It began simply because I needed to expend energy after Rob died. Lifting my camera was a too familiar weight. Making a photographic image felt too passive and perhaps more so reminded me of Rob and all the times I had photographed during our nearly thirty years together.

In the time since his death, painting in my journals (and perhaps painting on a large sheet of watercolor--I actually took out a sheet in anticipation) has become essential.  I dream of painting, rehearsing in my mind what I will do. I can feel my hand holding the brush, moving paint with my fingers.  I don't remember many dreams upon waking, but I do remember my painting dreams.  Most mornings when I am not at work I paint. When I can I paint in the evenings too, especially late evening.  I paint, let dry what needs to dry and come back. I also work across numerous journals now using a lot of different media. Some days I sketch in different journals. These may be people I have been observing in public spaces, like at a Starbucks or photographs or images from magazines that I use as references. On other days I may spend hours just painting backgrounds on journal pages with little anticipation of what I might end up creating on the page. Now and then I will just sketch what I imagine or paint without any guide.

Oddly, it was without any reference that I began painting. Below is the first painting I made after Rob died. It is non-representational and I thought it nothing more than a sloppy mess. I titled it, "Let Her Paint" and posted it on my blog nonetheless. Beneath all of that grief, I think I knew that physical act of painting would be necessary. I needed it so much and how grateful I am that painting was possible.

from an art journal (March 18, 2016)

Two months later I began to keep an art journal in earnest. I selected an old atlas that had been Rob's and gessoed several pages.  It was an oversized book and allowed me a lot of space to work. I painted the image below using a stencil and also free hand. Even now, looking at it, I still enjoy the image--mostly because of the way I used space across two pages. This morning when I reread the image, knowing I made it two months after Rob died,  I notice how life percolates beneath the ground unseen--like the will to live remained within me.

Page from art journal, May 18, 2016

After Father's Day I made  the two images below, using newspaper, ink, gesso, Stabilo pencil, and acrylic paint. As I look at these paintings, I notice the empty spaces surrounding each and how the the grief image (6.19.16) seems to float without an anchor, whereas the other image of sadness is anchored to the bottom of the page. Each new holiday, like Father's Day, was mostly a terror that first year. Less so the second year.

(stabilo pencil, gesso, acrylic paint, ink, newspaper, 6.20.16)

(stabilo pencil, gesso, acrylic paint, newspaper, 6.19.16)

The image of two women I made four months later crossed two large journal pages. I think about how I was seeing and not seeing at the time. Grief and loneliness alter reality.  The arrangement here of images and collage elements felt new to me.  Uncharted territory. What to do with empty space is a question I worked out on this page--much like I was working out in my life. After the death of a husband, large blocks of what felt like empty space become more noticeable. Understanding that I had choices and perhaps, more importantly, needed to see my own hand in my life, I began slowly to accept that the life I was making was my own.  I had been waiting for life to be given to me, not made. In the fall of last year I was learning that if I waited for something external to show me all there was to see, I would be waiting for a long time. Most days now, I accept that living is always about partial sight. We never really know where we are walking and what we will see.

from my art journal, 10.22.16 (gesso, found papers, acrylic paint, Tombow markers, tissue paper, ink)

Five months later in mid-March of 2017 I was thinking a lot about the burden of grief and that lovely poem by Molly Peacock, "Putting a Burden Down."  Many years ago I took a class at the 92nd Street Y with Molly and after the class ended she became a private teacher for me for the remainder of the year. I was writing a final project for a graduate degree--a collection of poems. I painted the image below in my journal. It was a week after the anniversary of Rob's death and I began to think that putting down grief is a decision not a divine directive. What rested in my hands was mine for the making. As Rob told me so many times, the only way out is through. After a year of grieving I came to understand that defining myself through grief and grieving was a choice. So too was putting it all down. And if only it was that simple.

(watercolor, pencil, acrylic paint, ink, March 2017)

A month later, I decided to spend the next 100 days painting, drawing and on occasion photographing faces.  I wanted to represent faces better.  This led me to painting most days and learning how to first try to control the paint brush and paint and paint representationally. Later I experimented with leaning into the work and seeing where it led. Below is one of my more expressive pieces. The painting happened across a month.  It was a painting I started and abandoned, returning to again and again. Finally, I just painted and scribbled with much abandon. Just as grief was loosening its grip from my heart and life, my hand was learning how to hold the top of of the paint brush looser, to trust mark making both literally and figuratively.

acrylic paint, crayon, early July 2017)

12 paintings with blackbirds (July - August, 2017)

In the last month, flocks of blackbirds have found their way into what I am painting. A friend suggested the old Beatles' song, "Blackbird," as an apt metaphor. And perhaps it is new wings I am trying out. Painting offers a language that is complementary and different than the words I use to speak and write. Painting reveals truths I might not know or could not say. Below is a detail from a painting I completed in my art journal on August 19th. I wonder about the partiality of it and also the sensuousness of the image. It is more blended, less precise. More heart than mind. What might suggestion have to do with healing?  I suspect as I paint more, I will learn.

Suggestion (August 19, 2017)

Next spring I will be taking an acrylic collage workshop with abstract painter, Jane Davies. Lately the call of the non-representational is loud.  I want to explore it in large ways, using big spaces to paint. I have been drawn to abstract expressionist art for decades, but have never tried my hand at it. These days find me bolder, more willing to risk.

After the death of a husband, little seems undoable.

#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: Saying Yes

Some recent painting I have been doing.

I have been practicing saying, yes.

Instead of listing in my mind the many reasons why I should not do something, I have been practicing doing. Just that. With my son achieving adult status in so many ways there is a freedom that I can now enjoy. And I have. To be truthful, I have spent this summer mostly playing with just a little bit of work thrown in. I have stretched a bit beyond my role as mom and am the better for it.

As I write this I am 650 miles from home in North Carolina--here to take an art course taught by Pam Carriker, an artist whose work I appreciate. I hope to learn a lot, especially about color mixing and portraiture.  It is somewhat unsettling to be in North Carolina without Rob, and yet it is not uncomfortable. I have learned that to be unsettled is not equal to discomfort. Being unsettled is often healthy. Time seems to have a way of smoothing the rough and taming the wild edges of grief and I am ever glad for that. I am 100-pages into a memoir chronicling the last two years and though wading into that sorrow is a challenge, I also think it deepens the healing. I have been in this state only one other time without my husband and never in Charlotte where Rob, Devon and I have travelled to and through more times than I can count. What is difficult after the death of my husband are all the new places I have traveled and experienced that Rob never got to know and never will.  But, here now I have taken a page from my husband's ways in the world and found a public space to write and it feels right.

This may sound odd but I love people. I love being around others, listening in at times, sharing at others. Given my profession as a consultant and educator I imagine enjoying others and loving children are not so unusual. But beyond profession, we all have a need to connect, to feel the human pulse that ties us spark to life. Matthew Lieberman in Social (2013) writes,

We are wired to be social. We are driven by deep motivations to stay connected with friends and family. We are naturally curious about what is going on in the minds of other people. And our identities are formed by the values lent to us from the groups we call our own (p. 2).

Here in North Carolina on my way to an art workshop, I am part of a group of artists I call my own. So I reached out when I got here to another participant who Sean (the man who picked me up from the airport) told me was also going to be at the workshop and was staying at the same hotel. Patricia is a delight and has led such an incredibly interesting life full of intrigue, foreign locales, and of course--art. We passed a lovely evening and knowing we will share this weekend experience is grounding.

This is what it means to live in the middle of things.

#SOL17: A Lifetime

They've Wandered Down the Years to Now (M.A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

I had expected a lifetime.

I never even questioned that we would not retire or live together well into our 80s. I looked into the future and saw us together.  Rob was not a sickly person and the two times he had pneumonia, he bounced back within a week.  It wasn't until two years ago that he first complained about a sharp pain that traveled across the right side of his chest.  We sat up at 3 in the morning, cups of tea before us at the old round table and Rob calmed down as we made a plan to see the doctor.  He had googled the ailment and came up with a diagnosis--a far kinder one than what would later be confirmed as stage 4 lung cancer. By 4 am, we were back asleep.

II.

Holidays remain difficult.  Grief does not sit itself inside me as it once did. These days when sadness announces itself loudly, firmly--it is brief and yet the initial sting is no less staggering than it was a year ago.

Fourth of July usually meant that my brothers would come for a cook out. This year was no different except of course there was no Rob. He always grilled and took such delight in it. We planned the menu, considering what I could cook on top of the stove or ready ahead of time and what he would grill--usually vegetables, meat, some kind of fish. We worked well together and always after my family left for the night, we would clean up and spend some time just talking--usually over cups of tea. Ours was a simple life.

Last night after my brothers and a friend left and Devon was tucked away in his room, I was rereading a book I had read more 20 years ago and I it caused me to remember the Cape that Rob and I had renovated in the mid-90s. That winter saw more than 100 inches of snow fall and we lived beneath the blue plastic canopy that covered the roof of our home. We were in our 30s and all things seemed possible and death did not seem like it was just two decades away. Ours was such a happy and artful home--the one where we first brought Devon.

III.

It still cuts like a knife when I think of how brief my husband's life was. I had expected a lifetime.

#SOL16: No Legitimate Time

Rob in Montana many years ago. We were on holiday. I think now that my husband was almost always laughing.

I.

What I mostly know, now that 16 months have gone by since Rob's death--nearly 2 years since he first got ill, is that love does not diminish. It does not lessen with time. Grief still arrives and brings with it waves of sorrow that open into deep pockets of joy. There simply is no legitimate time for grieving. There are no periods that are more or less acceptable. Time is far too slippery here.

Feel what you feel. To deny sadness is to have it inhabit your body, like the starling that now lives inside the exhaust fan on the side of my home.  It is better to feel than to hide.  Hiding requires not being.

II.

In A Short Course in Happiness After Loss, Maria Sirois describes the sudden whiplash of grief that happens well after the process of grieving has seemed to end:

The heart hits hard against the cage of the loss we thought we had somehow ‘resolved’ and we find ourselves on our knees, paralyzed on the blue kitchen tile, staring at the Tupperware we had taken out of the drawer to sort . . . and we can’t remember why because we can’t breathe, can’t hold our head up, can’t possibly organize anything because all we can feel is this rush of pain and the pressing crush of its sensation. As if we have been t-boned by a Hummer. Whiplash and slam.

I am writing this here so I will have a reminder, not of the ways that grief works, but rather of the ways that resiliency rises like a righteous set of wings that shadows grief. In the first months it is impossible to see this. Lately, I connect the two: grief gives way to resiliency. By naming the terror or sitting still in a sadness, grief is less the monster I have not faced and more the process I know too well.

Now and then, these waves of grief also bring stories of Rob and others. Remembering is a sweet gift. 

#SOL17: Stories and Storytellers

from my art journal, 2016

I.

Acceptance is so inadequate a word. An online dictionary defines acceptance as:

willingness to tolerate a difficult or unpleasant situation.

An unpleasant situation does not describe the death of a husband, nor is it merely difficult, or even a situation. And certainly, there was no willingness at least on my part to tolerate his death, as if being tolerant was somehow related to being bereft. Yet, in so many descriptions about grief, learning to accept the death is supposedly a kind of stage suggesting healing.

I want to suggest here that it isn't acceptance that marks a turn in the road of grief, but rather the shift in stories that are told about our loved one(s) who have died. Healing is better expressed when we can see them through the length of their lives, not just the tragic ending.


II.

Words feel inadequate, even when they offer us a start.  Earlier,  I was reading Jane Hirschfield's opening poem, "After Long Silence," from After. She ends the poem with this line:

"Yet words are not the end of thought, they are where it begins."

Her words started me thinking and I realized that it wasn't explanations that have most helped after my husband's death.  Knowing the five stages of grief still feels awkward and wrong. So no, explanations did not help often. Rather, it was stories that others told that lifted me.

Stories heal.


III.

Stories of others who have walked where I was walking helped to illuminate a path that was more often than not, dark. Grief grows shadows and stories lift those shadows, revealing what rests beneath. Stories give us the courage to look beneath the sadness. Stories reveal parts of ourselves we simply did not know before.

Those who tell stories of their own grief and recovery help to translate the animate life that was lost into something new and lasting. This is perhaps the gift that grief brings. This is what Shakespeare was on about in Sonnet 18: "So long lives this, and this gives life to thee."


IV.

What now feels like a million years ago I read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony and never forgot her opening:

“I will tell you something about stories 

[he said]

They aren't just entertainment. 

Don't be fooled. 

They are all we have, you see, 

all we have to fight off 

illness and death.

You don't have anything if you don't have the stories..."

I had barely turned 20 when I read this book and frankly I was baffled. I was too young, too inexperienced to understand how stories and death might connect and it remained a mystery for decades until my sweet husband's death allowed me to link stories, illness and death. I see now that this story I have been telling, writing here and sharing with you for nearly the last two years has been nothing less or more than how I answer the deep need to tell you about Rob--to keep him alive in words.

Stories transform lives-- especially for those of us who have lost so greatly.  It is a sacred job to tell stories. In some ways this is what it means to be a survivor--to be the one who lives.