#SOL17: Healing with Art

 Call and the Birds Will Come

I. 

A friend, Heidi, recently returned to school to study art therapy. I was delighted for her as this seems like a very good fit. I have no doubt she will be terrific. Thinking about art therapy led me to also think how for the last 19 months I painted most every day and in doing so I began to heal.

As some of you have remarked, the last few months black birds seem to have flown in and out of most of my paintings.  Another art friend, Jim, asked today why there were birds in so much of my work. I told him I was not completely sure why the birds are flying in and out, but I feel better knowing they are there. I also realized that the last section of the memoir I am writing has the subtitle, Wild Birds Rising. I suspect there is a connection. Perhaps the birds are spirits.


II.

A few weeks ago, my friend Jane's sister, Susan, died. The birds showed up again in force right after her death.  I didn't realize until this evening that her death affected me.  For the last two weeks I have been feeling down, revisiting the sadness I felt months after Rob died. Susan was three months older than Rob. Both were far too young to die. Last year, I spent a week with Susan in North Carolina at the beach and the beginning of August I had the opportunity to visit with her while I was in North Carolina taking an art class. Some people I've know forever and others have come in and out of my life briefly and yet profoundly touched it.  That was the kind of person Susan was.  She profoundly touched lives by simply being herself.

Some days I think the birds are those spirits that carry away pain. Some days I think the birds are the departed who find ways to wing back to this world.


III.

For me, painting reveals new ways of naming and feeling--ways I am often not aware of in a codified manner.

I sense knowing. '

Edward Hopper explained how the language of art opens us in ways that words simply do not.  He wrote, “If I could say it in words there would be no reason to paint.”

Here are a few of my new paintings.

How I See You (acrylic, collage, pencil, Tombow markers, gesso, digital remix)

Prayer  (acrylic, Tombow markers, pencil, digital remix)

Through a Window (acrylic, gesso, pencil, digital remix) 

Tangled (acrylic, ink, pencil, digital remix) 

Self Portrait  with Black Birds (Photograph, paint, transfer, acrylic)

A few art therapy links (Activities and books)

Here's a link to 100 Art Therapy exercises. Does anyone want to take some of these on? I am going to try to work my way through the list.

Here are 20 art therapy ideas that also looks good.

Art Heals: How Creativity Cures the Soul

Imagination in Action: Secrets for Unleashing Creative Expression

#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: 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: DNRs, Healing and Not Knowing

July 2016, (CitraSolv papers, original photographs, digital remix)

I.

I used to believe in miracles. I used to know that section about the light and dark and miracles from Whitman's Leaves of Grass by heart.

Now I know less and perhaps that's for the better.

II.

As I sat next to Rob's hospital bed watching as he slept in early February I told myself that even though he was unable to walk anymore that this malady was a passing concern that could and would be reversed once the cancer treatment took hold.

A few days earlier when we learned that Rob had a third staph infection he said to me, "Strap in. This is the hard part. This is why cancer is so hard to beat."

And I thought, Yes, exactly.  If this was easy the death rate wouldn't be so high." I believed then that Rob would be the exception.

It wasn't until the morphine, dilaudid, and fentanyl began to scramble Rob's reality that I felt doubt gain a bit of purchase. But even when my husband thought he was a teenager in Brooklyn, or when he perfected a British accent and spoke as if he was an admiral in his majesty's navy, I thought we would need to deal with addiction,  but at the end Rob would recover his life.

Stage 4 lung cancer and 3 staph infections in the space of four months should have had me reconsidering the idea of miracles--but it did not.

I was too scared to believe in anything but miracles.


III.

Looking back I can see that there was little reason to hope and yet hope is not the work of reason for it is born out of desire and is not necessarily rational.  I wanted my husband to live. I did not want to be alone. I believed Rob would beat the cancer against all odds and the odds were stacked against him. And so on the night of Devon's 17th birthday, Dev was home alone and I was at the hospital with Rob.  An attending doctor who I did not know asked me to step out into the hallway.  Rob was running a high fever and was having trouble breathing.  He was heavily medicated and had told me he wanted to go out that night with his friends. He was angry and frustrated. He thought he was at home in the house he grew up in in Brooklyn. He was adamant that he needed to get out of bed.

Does your husband have a DNR? 
A DNR? I asked.
Does he want to be resuscitated? Placed on life support? Have you discussed this with him?

Four weeks earlier Rob underwent spinal surgery and our oncologist had told us that Rob would never have been permitted to have the surgery if death was imminent.

We want him to live. I told the doctor whose name to this day I don't know.

Rob has at the very least six more months to live. That' what our oncologist said. So, yes we want him to live.

Your husband's lungs, both of them are filling. The antibiotics aren't working. We think there may be an embolism.

Are you saying Rob will die?

His lungs are filling and he may need life support in order to breathe.

We've never talked about this. Never. He was supposed to get his first immunotherapy treatment earlier today but couldn't because of this fever. Today is our son's 17th birthday. Rob cannot die on Devon's birthday. Do you understand? He can't. If he needs life support give it to him. What do I need to sign?

Rob was placed on high flow oxygen and moved from the oncology floor to a step down unit where he was assigned a nurse who kept watch that night. By late evening, Rob's fever broke and he became cognizant of what was happening. Gone was the unruly teenager and the British admiral. He asked me to read from a book of Icelandic myths that a doctor he had met a few weeks earlier had given him.

Outside the door, the nurse remained. He was the most reassuring person I met at the hospital. He was so competent. So kind. Inside the room, Rob rested and listened as I read aloud, drifting to sleep as the sound of the oxygen machine hummed and clanked. Five days later, early in the morning, the oncologist would tell us that Rob's prognosis had changed and that he was terminal. Rob refused all life support, signed the DNR, and by the next week he was home. Less than three weeks later he would die.

IV.

In the days before Rob died I prayed for a miracle. I think now that I was praying more for me than him for no one would have wanted him to live as he was. As his breathing worsened and became more and more labored, he woke in the middle of the night frightened for he had started to choke. I learned how to clear his airway and I began to pray for his death. In the last hour of his life, I told him it was okay to end this fight and to gain peace. I said what I thought he might need to hear if he could hear at all. Or at least I think I said these things. If I failed to say this then know that these are the things I would have wanted to say. It's hard to know what I said and what I thought.

V.

Miracles are unexpected and I don't believe in miracles much these days.  I do remain open to the unexpected however.

What I know, partial as it is, is that spiritual matters are beyond the end of my reach. Why such early death happens to good people like Rob I still don't understand. Why a great dad dies and leaves behind his just-turned-17-year-old son I can't fathom. Bad things happen to good people all over this world. And what these months have revealed is that I don't need to know why bad things happen in order to live. I just need to accept that they do.

To not know and to accept not knowing is a step towards healing. I wonder if a belief in miracles stands in the way of healing. Such a belief allows me to hold responsibility in abeyance.

I want to remain open to the unexpected, but not cowered by reality.

Mary Ann's One Little Word for 2017

from my art journal, January 1, 2017 (gesso, water based markers and crayons, pencil, digital remix)

I. 

2016 saw the loss of my husband, my partner, the father of our child. It felt as if one minute we were planning a holiday to Maine and the next I was planning a funeral. I would like nothing more than to say that 10 months later, I am all healed, but that simply isn't true--no matter how much I might have once wished it to be so. 

My one little word for 2017 is heal. It is a word that represents both goal and process. To heal means to restore to health. It derives from the Old English word, hǣla, which also means to make whole. 

I am more parts than whole. 

II. 

Sometimes this loss feels like an amputation. There is an emptiness that (in)forms my life--deep holes I cannot seem to fill. I know Rob is dead and yet I find myself anxious to get home at the end of a work day. For decades, I arrived home with the certain knowledge that my husband would be there. My voice would ring out expecting to hear his answering call. My body would anticipate meeting his body. My eyes would seek his above the edge of the newspaper he was lowering. There is no getting over such a loss. 

I am lost.

III.

Nothing about grief is simple or straight forward save the way sorrow rises up and strikes unexpectedly. Friends ask how I am doing and having just gotten through the holiday season, our 26th wedding anniversary, and each of our birthdays in the span of 6 weeks, the most I can say is that I know where my feet are and I am standing. Some days this is enough.   Now that the shock is mostly gone and acceptance is more the norm, I can feel how worn out I am, how emotionally spent I feel. It has been such a long 16 months.

I am weary.

IV. 

Within such turmoil there are moments where the rich life Rob and I made across these last few decades is revealed.These noticings surprise and comfort as they show newer understandings of love--ones I could not have known had it not been for my marriage and this loss. 

Love steadies. It steadies the oscillating nature of grief and shows me the resiliency within.

I am mending.

V. 

Heal--my one little word for 2017. A word I can return to again and again as I work through the pain and dislocation of heart and spirit. That's it. Just heal. And frankly, that is enough.

#SOL16: Sublime

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

I.

The weather has finally turned sending the too-hot and humid summer-like weather we had this past week in the Northeast US, packing.  Good riddance. The first fall-feeling day is here. Gale winds, raw cold, and buckets of rain ("Buckets of tears/Got all them buckets comin' out of my ears/Buckets of moonbeams in my hand...")

And it is absolutely glorious to walk in the fall of rain, feel the wind so strong tug at the umbrella that I must hold at an angle--less the wind with a sharp snap will turn it inside out. This afternoon I have the path to myself. No one else seems to have ventured forth and surely I can see the appeal of curling up with a good book in an oversized chair with some mint tea. I painted most of the morning, making the journal page at the top of this post and after lunch I found myself heading to that chair with some tea and a book. It was after all, raining.

So? I thought.  I transferred the hot tea to an old Starbucks cup, threw on a sweatshirt, and let myself outside after saying goodbye to Devon.  To me, nothing affirms life like a storm.


II.

I am rounding the last mile when the audio cuts out and my phone begins to ring. The display reads, Patty. My oldest friend in the world is phoning. We have known each other since we were each 4-years-old. I answer right away--using one hand to hold the umbrella and cup of tea and the other to put the phone closer to my mouth. We haven't spoken in a few months and I am eager to catch up. Between old friends there is no settling in to the conversation. No awkward pauses. No wondering what to say. There is just talk and lots of it--as if we talked every day. And well, I guess for so many years we did.

Pat tells me that creating helps ease grief.  Her husband John retired early and has taken up writing. "He says he needs two years.  One year to write and the next to reflect on that writing."

"How wise," I tell her, "to give himself that second year."

Pat's an art therapist. She recommends movement and creating as means to ease grief. She laughs telling me it was in the low 30s this morning in Michigan and raining too and she went out for a run anyway.  After about 20 minutes of which only the last 5 were dedicated to the election (Pat says with a chuckle that in Michigan all of the millennials and she voted for Sanders), she rings off as she is heading to a client.


III.

Later, after night has fallen and the wind has quieted a bit, I am reading an old copy of Flow Magazine.  I see there is an article about loss and begin reading. Dealing with loss says René Diekstra,

"is the ability to create something from our pain. This can be simple, like keeping a diary, contacting a fellow-sufferer or looking at a painting. Re-forging our pain can frequently lead to something sublime. The main question we must ask ourselves is: What can I do with my pain besides suffer from it?" (from Flow Magazine,  Issue 12).

What can I do? As much as there are days when I desire to stay active, I realize that I am even more partial to solitude. I enjoy writing and making art and both of these tend to be done alone. Painting all morning fueled me, allowed me to feel content and even, joyful.  It is the small acts that heal. Talking with an old friend. Walking in the rain. Watching what begins to emerge as I paint and become.

#SOL16: Healing

from my art journal, 6.22.16 (acrylic paint, ink, stabilo pencil, and Word Photo app)
The quotation is from King Lear.

The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what feel, not what we ought to say.
  

- William Shakespeare - King Lear 

I.


This past Sunday was emotionally difficult. It was Father's Day and my son at the very tender age of 17 no longer has his dad.  A month after Devon turned 17, Rob died. I worry about how I am ever going to fill the immense void that Rob's death has caused in our son's life. I walked through Monday largely as if I was hung over, reclaimed a bit more of myself by Tuesday morning, and felt good by Tuesday afternoon. What I want to say here though is less about the pain that punctuated the last few days and more about the resiliency that frames both Dev's life and my own.

Yesterday, we went to Steven's Institute so Devon could meet with a few professors. He reports that the meeting went well and he said that he learned that being able to program in several languages and building his own computers may not be as common a set of skills as he first thought. After his meeting we ate dinner at a local Cuban restaurant. The meal was fun.  Having time with Devon to just talk and joke and eat good food and have no dishes to clean up ended well a good day. I thought of Rob, missed him, and knew that he would have approved of the day and would have been proud of both of us.

C. S. Lewis describes grief as being like "a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape."  Some days, like holidays, are a terror. Most days have some pocket of sadness, as well as visions of possibilities. A range of emotions inform my days as I awaken from the nightmare of Rob's illness and death.

As we were driving home from Hoboken, Devon said to me that he is once again becoming interested in creating projects for himself.

"It's been so long since I wanted to stay up to 3 a.m. to figure out solutions for a problem or to frame a project. Now I do again. I'm filled with an energy I thought I had lost," Devon tells me.

II.

Each of us is healing. Before us are possibilities to name.

#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.

#SOL16: The Familiar Falling Away

The Familiar Falling Away (M.A. Reilly. Devon in Ringwood, 2011)

I.

Today the wind is fierce: a howling menace whose wildness is oddly attractive. It says anything can happen. 

The weekend's frigid weather has turned unseasonably warm and today finds a balmy 60 degrees beyond our front door. It's mid-February and rain falls at first intermittently and then steadily all day. The three front steps were partially covered with a thin veneer of ice this morning. I used the ice scraper Rob always keeps by the door to break it up so that the Hospice delivery could occur.

My life these days is mostly filled with attending to small details. Taking Dev to school. Arranging for friends who are coming in to stay. Figuring out when to go to the hospital. Figuring out how best to get Rob's mom to and from the hospital. Remembering to eat dinner. Doing the laundry. Vacuuming.

The one steady pulse that runs through all of these sometimes banal duties is the hope Rob will be home tomorrow.

II.

Rob Painting. 2.15.16

My home which has always been such a solace feels more like an enemy these last few days. Everywhere I turn is a reminder of what I am losing, what is slipping from my fingers, my heart.

Ours is a house of books. A house of art. A house of play. Yesterday Rob began to feel anxious when the doctor explained how he would be titrated off the high flow oxygen and placed on a nasal cannula. As he waited for Xanax, I suggested to Rob he might want to paint. I had brought watercolor pencils, paper and brushes the day earlier. He agreed. A friend had left lavender essential oil (thanks Liz) that I applied to his temples and within thirty minutes he was calm.

In a 2011 study (Toward A Brain Based Study of Beauty), researchers Tomohiro Ishizu and Semir Zeki found that there was a 10 percent increase in blood flow to the part of the brain where joy is expressed when viewing a beautiful painting. I wondered if joy doesn't increase even more when art is being made, not only viewed.  Rob was calm and pleased by the time he finished painting.

III.

One sure thing Dev and I have learned is that we cannot know the future--be it ten minutes from now or a week. Tomorrow, we hope Rob will be home.  It will mark day 50 since he was last here.  50 days have passed and the house, like us, is unsteady.

Today the wind is fierce: a howling menace whose wildness remains attractive. It says anything can happen. 

Anything.

Anything at all.

#SOL16: Certainty

Winter (M. A. Reilly, 2012)

I.

On my way to see Rob the unusual happens. I am walking down a hospital corridor, heading towards the palliative care center where Rob is waiting. It is very early in the morning. No one seems to be around when my right eye begins to blur and a vision blooms full. I see the cancer cells that riddle Rob's thoracic area: lungs, spine, ribs, and sternum, along with his liver and spleen light like gold nuggets. And I watch as the cancer is drawn from his body, as more and more cells are swept into a black hole held in an outstretched hand. I see the gold bits of matter disappear into the blackness, like a giant mouth swallowing the cancer. All of this happens as I'm standing still in the hallway, the early morning sun falling through a window to my right.

Later, Rob will tell me that he visualizes the cancer in his body as long dark tunnels that are oddly empty.

I I.

A few days ago I received an email from my son's friend's mom. She asked me to read, Radical Remissions:Surviving Cancer at All Costs.  The premise of the text which grew out of the author's dissertation is "Although unexpected remissions are rare, thousands of people have experienced them." As I read the book I was filled with both hope and an odd embarrassment that dogged the belief that Rob could live. There's an inner voice that says such hope is foolish; that hanging on to nonmedical 'cures' is dangerous, wrong.

For the last six months, interactions with doctors and residents, technicians and interns have caused me to follow blindly. Of the hundreds of tests Rob has been subject to, less than 1 percent have been reported to us. Only our family doctor, two oncologists, and two surgeons shared results with us.  The majority of medical doctors who ordered test after test: daily blood cultures, X-rays, cat scans, MRIs, body scans, blood tests and on and on and on during these last six months failed to discuss the results with us. In many ways we were and certainly felt inconsequential.

III.

It's so easy to lose yourself, to surrender your will, to doubt what you know. Certainty is a foolish desire.