Some days it’s almost as if he were upstairs reading...

Rob at home a year before his death. 

Some days it’s almost as if he were upstairs reading. Perhaps, he would be sitting in the easy chair he loved that used to be in the guest room, or in our room putting away laundry—folding it as he did so perfectly.

The old familiarity developed across decades together resurfaces and I am all anticipation, and as quickly as I want, I remember too.  In that second, it’s as if all that I have felt punctuates my breath and my heart stills. I have to stop myself from calling up the stairs to him, as I remember he is not there, cannot be there. Not anymore.

Sorrow is as fluid as breathing. And though I do not dwell in sorrow, the many faces of loss surely have changed me as well. I want to tell you that this loss, this single parenting, this need to take stock of self has made me a better person. And that is no small thing in this age of me, me, me. I carry these three years of experience like an extra chromosome and am reminded that all privilege is stripped at death and how we have lived is the measure of our lives, not what we have acquired.

To say I miss Rob would be wrong, for miss, is too milky a term. There are no words I know.

Even now after three years have passed, loss is incalculable, fleeting, rooted, recalled. It is all of these things and none of these. The only constant is the inconstancy of grief and pulsation of life,  Life demands, and I find it impossible to not greet it fully. 

This is How You Heal

Arriving (M.A. Reilly, Over the Atlantic Years Ago)

I.

In the year after his death, broken from its moorings, my body no longer felt like mine.  Adrift, I felt legless. Yes, I lifted an arm to take down the tea cup. I pressed an arm against the doorway. I moved in the world with a mindlessness that kept the separate, broken parts of me together.  The limbs I once knew for 56 years propelled me into the world where I least wanted to go and where I was most desperate to escape to.

Sorrow weighs and now I see it is more anchor than burden.

II.

Three years have passed and sorrow lifts like the first rays of morning sunlight across the sea. I am home in this body again, different than I was before. But aren't we all moving to stay whole?  Isn't that the impetus in life?

Here's a truth to hold close in those early days when you most want to distance yourself from the pain of loss. Sorrow does lift and you lift it with the grace of something you could not know before.

#SOL17: Waking Up

Forgive Yourself (M.A. Reilly, 6.3.17)

Have I been sleeping?

I've been so still 

Afraid of crumbling 

     - Melissa Etheridge

I.

I did not know I was sleeping awake--walking through the days and months after Rob's death with eyes open wide, and yet, somehow blind. At such times, sadness is more buoy than anchor. It keeps afloat the body that has little direction it can name or know. It gives meaning to the march of days and nights that follow the death helping to soften that slow trickle of time by the waning and waxing of tears.  At first trepidation creeped into my steps and living felt more tenuous than not. The simplest decisions felt too overwhelming to make.

These first year was marked by getting through, crying less, feeling more, and eventually beginning to notice the world beyond my immediate reach still pulsed with life.


II.

Image I made in March.

For the last two months I have drawn, painted, collaged, or photographed a face each day as part of a 100-Day Challenge. I wonder about my choice of subject. What exactly is it that I needed to learn?

Was it simply a matter of learning to draw parts: mouths, eyes, ears, noses, the line of the jaw as I first told myself?  Or was it more complicated?

Was I trying to relearn the curve of my own face? To know how the tremble of lips does give way to the lightening of eyes?  Each time I dropped white paint into the iris of an eye, I animated that image. Was this process a means to also animate myself?

Possibility is not an external matter--a Holy Grail to seek. Rather, hope and possibility are rekindled within and among others.


III.

My son recently told me to stop feeling sorry for myself. I bristled at his words and initially felt even sorrier for myself until this too felt burdensome and I stopped. Years ago a therapist I was seeing gave me a directive I did not want to do. I quickly asked, How will I ever do that?

He didn't answer me at first. Rather he asked me to lift one of my feet off of the carpet and I did.

"Like that," he told me.

Like that.

It is not that I haven't been busy. I have. But beneath these activities, I have been a body waiting. A woman waiting for something to change.


IV.

How do you move through grief?  How do you separate grief from a body?
Lift your heart off of the floor. Secure it where it has always belonged, and move on, knowing grief will follow, but it will not lead.


V.

It was Edward Said who wisely told us that we are well past a beginning before we can name it. The distance between Rob's illness and death, the aftermath, and now is measurable--allowing me to see my husband's life and death, and the continuation of my life, my son's life--here, now.

There is hope and possibility these days and I cannot locate a single event that marked this transformation as fact for there is no single event, no shining moment. As I mourned, life around me continued and I slowly tested welcoming the roar and press of living with tender hands--so often supported by others.

This life, I call my own, is what I make. It is so often about what we make, alone and with others. Sometimes it is that complicated and that simple. 

#PoetryBreak: The Main Thing to Know

Grief (Cohen and Reilly, 2016)

The main thing to know
about grief is how lonely it feels,
like an empty boat moored
beneath moonlight.
Here, breath
remains the color
of silence.

When you
finally speak
grief rises
from the ground
like thunder,
like a too-angry god
so loud
you can't hear
your own wings beating.

Even now,
your heart
feels too tender,
too undone
like the bowline
that slips
from
my hand
to form
this poem.

It is in the making
that you learn
to live
again.

#SOL17: Live in the Layers

Mono Print Painting (M. A. Reilly, March 2017)

I have walked through many lives,
some of them my own,
and I am not who I was
though some principle of being
abides, from which I struggle
not to stray. 

Stanley Kunitz, The Layers

I. 

What's sacred?  What definitions of self are unwavering? In Stanley Kunitz's poem, the speaker learns, “Live in the layers,/not on the litter.” I have pondered those two lines for a long time, intrigued by their brevity and bigness. There's considerable wisdom in that bit of advice. 

Across the decades, identity layers have been formed and reformed by the attention paid and missed, by pressures and weights, as well as through the many understandings composed while living. Reflection matters. How easy it has been at times to be overly attentive to what rests at the surface, what Kunitz would call the litter.  In the last year, I have learned--out of necessity-- to tune my ears to silence and name those deep strengths and earth-bound truths I call my own.

II.

At the center of my identity is the bone-deep belief that I am highly competent--a problem framer. I remember being so surprised after Rob's death when I had trouble doing ordinary acts, like booking a flight. I sat for hours, unmoving, until I realized that I just had to get on with it. And I did.  

I also am empathic. When I was writing my dissertation, Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of "I for Myself, Myself for Other" was central to the learning theory I would later compose. The self, as Bakhtin said, is always in dialogue with other.  Identity is dialogic--I exist in relationship to others. Even memories that we often think of as private are socially composed. What Bakhtin's writing helped me to learn is that empathy happens in the return to self.

As a child, I came to understand that I was a problem framer and empathic.  Later, I refined these understandings through my roles as wife, mother, sister, friend, teacher, artist, business owner, and now widow. 

III.

Some years ago I wrote a poem that looked at these beginnings based on  George Ella Lyon's poem, "Where I'm From." I wrote it during an exercise in a class.  (I suspect you may have your own version too.) The poem means more now then when I wrote it.  Then I did not have need of the deep, abiding trust in self that this last year has required. These losses, multiple and shattering, have been costly, even though I realize that I am the better for it. 

Like the speaker in Kunitz's poem, as I age, I too have struggled not to stray. 

IV.

Where I'm from (Based on George Ella Lyons' poem) 


Self portrait, March 2017

I am from blocks
of ivory soap
of ice wedged between milk bottles
in the summer,
from the white, gabled home
with dark green shutters,
so solid against sudden storms.
I am from the gnarled Cherry tree,
its pale pink blossoms
translucent
against the wet, black bark.

I’m from tinseled trees and stacks of books
from Catherine Mary and Robert Emmett.
I’m from daily piano scales and two-part Inventions.
From Pop who played ragtime, all the time.
I’m from “batter up,”
and “I was just passin’ the time of day.”
From Marches on Washington
to “say five Hail Marys,”
knowing too well the slim comfort of the confessional--
so dark and thick with secrets.

I’m from Stamullen,
tucked tight alongside the Irish Sea.
From late afternoon tea with those
who came back from the war
and those who could not give up the ghosts.
I am from all of this
from the limbs that formed
those long afternoons
strong in ways I’ve learned to test.

#SOL17: Distances

A road in Tuscany, Rob and I walked (2013)

One learns a landscape finally not by knowing the name or identity of everything in it, but by  perceiving the relationships in it... Barry Lopez, Crossing Open Ground

I.

It is nearly a year after Rob's death. It is nearly a year and I struggle to accept how someone who lived so wide awake is no more. His was an animated life--no standing on the sidelines for my husband. He laughed often and told stories continuously--lapsing into any number of voices while doing so and gesturing with his hands.

He was a full-body storyteller who was often the center of a gathering. His was a gregarious life. Rob loved people, and derived energy by being among others. And now all that liveliness is gone.

Gone.


II.

And though I have more memories than minutes, I still feel an absence as if the Law of Conservation of Energy was wrong. I too have read the first law of thermodynamics and understand (somewhat) that energy cannot be created or destroyed, but rather is transformed. Isn't that what Whitman was all about at the end of "Song of Myself?" Look for me under your boot heels, he told us. But that knowledge offers the widow cool comfort.

It is the large, yawning space that has opened this last year between my husband's animated life and his death, that is so hard to cross, so hard to give a name to that sticks.

A million times I have turned to say something to him these last twelve months. A million times I have turned and remembered he is no longer here.

#SOL 16: The Unbanked River

House By the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2010)

Each time is true, but the truths are not the same.

                                   Alan Lightman, Einstein's Dreams

I.

It isn't only the absence that makes the holidays so difficult. It's how memories free flow like a river unbanked. Earlier my son rushed in to tell me he was testing the speed of a new router. Armed with an iPad he plopped down on the sofa and I took a second to study him in that unguarded moment. And as I looked, I glimpsed the toddler who approached most days with a similar curiosity.

Daddy? 

Umm. 

I fixed the wall good. 

What wall?    

The one by the steps. I fix it.  

Okay, good.                   

We  had just moved into a newly built home and as we got setttled that first night Devon was nonstop chatter about fixing a wall. We were so tired and excited and we told him how good that was that he fixed the wall and he smiled with a pride I can still recall. After we had put him to sleep, Rob would discover that our then three-year-old had used green and yellow markers to draw all over the stairwell wall. Those were Devon's Bob the Builder days and he was always fixing something. Even now 14 years later, there is a faint staining that remains.

Subtle.
Heart wrenching.

We always meant to repaint, but never found time or money to do so. And now, well now, those slight stains are reminders. What remains is of course of greater interest after a loved one has passed. How different might our lives have been had we known the little time Rob would have here on earth--would have with our son? Better, I imagine to not know such things.


II.

These days I rewrite so many private memories with the new knowledge of how much time Rob had left. 13 years after Devon fixed the wall, 13 years almost to the day, I would answer the house phone early one morning and then pass it to Rob who would learn he had cancer. Nothing would ever be the same again. And yet, nothing ever is.

There is a clarity that sorrow births that reshapes meaning. It's like at the end of Thornton Wilder's Our Town when Emily returns from the dead to glimpse a lived day.

I didn't realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed. Take me back...up the    hill...to my grave. But first: Wait! One more look.          

Looks left and then out past audience and then to the right 

Good-by, Good-by, world. Good-by, Grover's Corners...Mama and Papa. Good- by to clocks ticking...and Mama's sunflowers. And food and coffee. And new-ironed dresses and hot baths...and sleeping and waking up. Oh, earth, you're too wonderful for anybody to realize you. 

And it is this knowledge of the present where we stand and so often look beyond that cuts us. We feel that sharp edge of that understanding borne from failing to notice. It is the seemingly unimportant and ordinary moments of living that best define us--that we miss the most. And when we realize that we have failed to love these moments as we lived, we share Emily's regrets. We share her pain until we forget again.

And we will forget.


III.

Life rushes on and our losses that feel so profound are hardly specks in the cosmos.  I marvel these days at the fierce pulsing of life. A river unbanked.


IV. 

The Stage Manager closes the Wilder's play by noting:

There are the stars doing their old, old crisscross journeys in the sky. Scholars haven't settled the matter yet, but they seem to think there are no living beings up there. Just chalk...or fire. Only this one is straining away, straining away all the time to make something of itself. The strain's so bad that every sixteen hours everybody lies down and gets a rest.

And perhaps it is this straining that disrupts the sweet ebb and flow of the river. Perhaps it is this straining that reveals the mindlessness that lulls us to forget the necessary unbanking a river will claim, must claim. 

Memory is so fleeting and we forget the rush and spill of water beyond the pathways we have made. We forget how this alters the shape and look of the landscape we carry within.

The river finds what is has always been regardless of the many banks we have built to tame it.


V.

Grief gives us a new geography and a new lexicon of utterances and sighs that allow us to see and hear differently. The unbanked river transforms the familiar. There we hardly know the water--the once steady ebb and flow is now difficult to discern. We have waded far and buoyed by constraints and by absences, we feel a new meter beating through us, rising up. We will give it its way as we must.

When I look back, when I recall the nearly-30 years with Rob, what I see mostly is that we loved fearlessly. 

#SOL16: What Grief Teaches

Rob in ICU last New Year's day. He would die two months later.

Tell me the landscape in which you live and I will tell you who you are. 

                                                 -José Ortega y Gasset

I.

In  the years I taught writing I did not know that it would save my life. I never imagined. I wish I could go back to those many students I taught and say, Listen carefully. Writing might save your life one day. Forget the assignments. Throw away the how-to books. Skip the tests. Write because you have something tugging at your sleeve and you cannot name it. Not yet.

But perhaps I overstate. My love for hyperbole has gotten the best of me. Writing never saved me.

Wrong verb.

Let me try again.


II.

What I did not know as my husband was dying was that writing would be a conduit for opening possibilities. In times of sickness and stress, space collapses. Orientation becomes confused. Last year we lived more like Edwin Abbott's Flatlanders. We were lost in this 3-dimensional world. In those dark days, light could not find us. It could not move up or down, for there was neither. We were more acted upon than acting.

Then, writing helped to reshape, rename, and illuminate the moment where I stood--showing me the top of my own two feet planted on terra firma. Giving me dimension. At first it was the compulsion to name what was happening as my husband's illness, hospital stays, and compounding medical issues gathered weight. Against the myriad of changes, writing helped me to say what I was often too frightened to hear. A lot of this writing I kept private as I did not want to share doubts with Rob. Hope is such a fragile thing. But as his illness grew graver and his touch with reality loosened, I began to record thoughts and share them here on this blog.

I so needed you and you heard me.

You listened when my own husband was too far removed from reality to bear witness. Rob was preparing himself for his own death. He was tinkering at an edge I could not see or visit. The distance between life and death begins well before the last breath is made. As he would later tell me, just a couple of days before his death, "I have figured out how to cross over."

And he did. 

Even now there are moments when his leaving, his death, catches me by surprise. 


III.

As winter edged into spring last year, I wrote because I could see no future. None. I had more energy than sense. Saying the impossible helped to rid my body of pain. In those days, I was more pain than flesh. I wrote to name what was just outside the reach of my fingers. Throughout the spring and summer I was unable to generate a single daydream of a possible life for myself. It was as if I was trapped inside a TV network that had signed off for the night. Instead of a random show playing, there was only a test pattern.

A holding pattern. 

Regularly scheduled life would resume sometime. Later.

I wrote to shatter that screen.


IV.

By fall I could imagine.  Perhaps the many months of painting and drawing and writing helped give shape to darkness. Perhaps the act of making, lit up the corners and bid me to be courageous enough to be present.  

And now with winter upon us I am coming almost full circle. 

The nights in late December are deeper and the wind more biting than I recall from a year ago. It is bracing. Lively. 

When a love dies, innocence dies too. I still write most days. I make marks with paint and pen, pencil, too. And I have learned that this pain I have named is not unique. Grief finds expression in our lives, as does joy and all that comes between. 

V. 

There is no future--just what we imagine and hold up, now and then as truths. And sometimes these truths become embodied. Each day there is a life to make. Each breath says, I am becoming. Like these digital marks I lay down with the press of my fingers, life is more about what we make and less about what gets made. This is what Rob's death has helped me to learn. I am what I make, what I do. 

Years ago, Thomas Merton explained that "[s]olitude is not something you must hope for in the future. Rather, it is a deepening of the present, and unless you look for it in the present you will never find it." 

VI. 

Mostly I write to deepen the present. I chose to live deeply, intentionally. Even at my saddest, I knew that running would ill serve me. 

Stand in the pain. Be the pain. Name it. 

On that cold February morning when we learned Rob was dying, he commanded me to not hide myself away. A year later, I am like Thoreau's understudy and I know Rob would approve. This year, I too went to the woods to live deliberately. I thought grief was the absence of a future. What I could not know then as I do now is that what we hold in our own hands is what is most essential--not for what it is and isn't, but rather because we claim it.

I am responsible for this life I am making.  

VII.

I wonder how it was possible that a mere hour after learning he would die in the matter of days, Rob knew the exact words I would most need to hear. Live brilliantly, he told me. For months these words shifted, took on new meaning as I emerged from the hold of grief. Now, I understand that living brilliantly is what I have been holding in the palm of my hand. 

To write is to savor the here--the now--to embrace the responsibility for your life. 

#SOL16: A Dead Fir Tree

the dead fir tree.

The fir tree next to the front stoop died two weeks after Rob. It did so suddenly without a hint of sickness. Green one day and then not. It's a sad looking tree now, still draped with Christmas lights--all the more pronounced now that the needles have thinned and browned. Vinca vines from potted plants have begun to curl themselves along the tree's perimeter.  A reminder perhaps that life resurges, seeks its voice in all things.

The tree's twin is on the other side of the stoop and it seems to have grown at least another foot since March. Now it is lush and green. Its strings of light rest easy, mostly hidden among the many overlapping branches. There's an odd symmetry to the front of my home. Symbolic even.

For the longest time I have intended to replace the fir, but have not done it.  I inquired about the cost last spring and it was not too dear to do.  Yet, I have hesitated as if I can't seem to bring myself to have it gone. To see the absence it makes. To replace it.

Perhaps, I have developed a newfound affinity for the dead.  I can't bear to part with even this odd reminder of the terms I now live with, the terms that define me, partially.

#SOL16: Four Words

I.

I didn't know what being brave meant. Courage was more an abstraction, not of this world--or at least of my world at the time. Now I see more. Towards the end of Rob's life a friend sent me a private tweet that simply said, Try to stay curious. At the time I was barely hanging on and I didn't stop to think how staying curious could keep a body whole, present, brave. But words are sometimes acted upon without conscious thought.

By the last day of February, Rob's hold on reality was fractured. On that day, I recorded this:

Rob has had a total break with reality. Even when he did not know me by name, he knew me by sight, sound, touch. Now he stares beyond me. Yesterday he said he wanted to die and who could blame him? (2.29.16)

I wrote that early in the morning as I watched him grow still. And later that same day I would open Twitter and read the message about curiosity. That night as the house quieted those words found me again.  Curled in the chair pushed up against the hospital bed, I listened as my brave Rob figured out how to consent. How to leave. He would be lucid again--temporarily--before the foot he had in this world was gone. He would tell me during the next few days that he had figured out how to cross over.

He would die seven days later.


II.

Six months have passed and though the calendar won't note the season's official end for another few weeks, summer closes with Labor Day.  Early this morning I was reading Henri Nouwen's The Genesee Diary (recommended by another friend via Twitter) and came upon this:

"Back in my 'cell' I unpacked my suitcase and was surprised by the collection of books I had decided to take with me: A Spanish Bible, the works of Saint John of the Cross, a history of the United States, a book about common weeds, and the novel, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance" (Kindle Locations 128-130). 

The mention of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance brought me back years--nearly a decade before I would meet Rob. Then I was a college student and the whole campus read the book, not too long after it was first published. I recall knowing it was an impressive work by what others had to say, but at the age of 17 it was out of my reach.  This morning I reread the opening, noting how the idea of perspective is illuminated. The father/narrator thinks,

"At age eleven you don’t get very impressed with red-winged blackbirds.  

You have to get older for that. For me this is all mixed with memories that he doesn’t have. Cold mornings long ago when the marsh grass had turned brown and cattails were waving in the northwest wind. The pungent smell then was from muck stirred up by hip boots while we were getting in position for the sun to come up and the duck season to open. Or winters when the sloughs were frozen over and dead and I could walk across the ice and snow between the dead cattails and see nothing but grey skies and dead things and cold. The blackbirds were gone then. But now in July they’re back and everything is at its alivest and every foot of these sloughs is humming and cricking and buzzing and chirping, a whole community of millions of living things living out their lives in a kind of benign continuum.  

You see things vacationing on a motorcycle in a way that is completely different from any other" (p. 4).  

Reading Pirsig this morning sent me back to my art journal to paint. I had blackbirds on my mind. Ravens actually. And I painted outside as crows called to one another and throughout it I felt an odd sense of peace.

from my art journal (9.5.16 - gesso, acrylic and watercolor paint, ink, digital remix)

III.

There are some things you have to get older for. Others that defy age. I know this now.

Most days I begin with the hope the day will teach me what I most need to learn--what I will surely forget. Against the waves of grief, the making helps. I was told it would be making art that would heal me and perhaps there is some truth to that. So after reading a bit of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I took out an art journal and painted outside. I felt the wind, heard the call of birds through trees, and watched the way light moved. Soon it will be fall.

These too may well be things you have to get older for.

I painted boldly, allowing movement and line to guide my hand.  Meaning emerged and I stayed curious--whole, present, brave.

#SOL16: Doorways and Walls

The House by the Tracks (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

"I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering--but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are." - James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

I.

For the last year I have tried to find meaning in Rob's sickness and in his death. I've wanted to soothe what seems impervious to soothing. Since his death, I experience, most often daily, a reoccurring shock.  How could a man just 60 who so imbued life with such joy, optimism, and love wake with a sharp pain in his side one morning in late summer and 6 months later die?

I've sought an explanation I could hold in hand.
I have wanted to hold something concrete.

II.

I noticed recently that I keep track of ages now.

I'm driving when I hear the end of a news show. The announcer says that the young man, the subject of the show,  began a museum. He died at age 32 from cancer. I stop listening and catalogue the age and death. Later another announcer will say that Gene Wilder has died at 83. On Facebook I read that a man I worked with a few years ago lost his wife, who was just 46.

The age at death fascinate me now. And each announcement I measure against Rob's death: younger, same age, older.


III.

I see now that my understanding of death is immature, ill informed. Without a strong spiritual belief, death leads nowhere. It is a wall that cannot be passed through.

I think about this as I read Thomas Merton's Love and Living.  There he wrote, "Yet merely to declare that when a living being ceases to live, it 'dies,' is perhaps to say nothing of any importance at all" (p. 97). Without a spiritual grounding the most profound meaning I can muster is that there is none. Death severed from life is meaningless. We live. We die.

Merton understands death as a doorway we walk through.  He writes that human death allows us to "receive the gift of pure actuality in the love of God" (p. 105).  For Merton we undergo several deaths: the death of the ego as we move from child to adult; the death of more juvenile ideas as we mature, the death of the body.  Merton writes, "As man grows into other stages of human development, he realizes that there are ways in which life affirms itself by consenting to end" (p. 101).

Consenting to end.

IV.

Early in Love and Living Merton tells us, "And whatever you do, every act, however small, can teach you everything— provided you see who it is that is acting" (p. 14). I know this inquiry into who is acting is important. With what voice do I utter these words?

Everyone dies. The pain of knowing even beloved husbands die years too early sticks with me.

V.

Towards the end of Rob's life he told me he believed in God. He said it as if it was a foregone conclusion and frankly I was a bit surprised. But I watched as he moved through denial he was dying. He seemed to forget the prognosis. Then I watched as he was trying to remember an important appointment he needed to attend. During this time he was so busy moving and fixing things I could not see with his hands. Then there was the raw and painful acceptance that he was dying and that he wanted to end his life.  He told Devon he would be dead by 2:30.  Then there was the move to a greater interior life where he told me he had to figure out how to cross over and later that he had figured this out.  Last there was the consenting to end as I watched my husband slip from here to somewhere else.

Not a wall, but a window, a door, an opening.

To sever Rob's life from his death is to close a door, wall up a window, render one a cripple.  Death is not the event. It is not.

#SOL16: Design

I.

from my art journal: Widow (gesso, acrylic paint, ink, pencil)
based on an image by Pam Carriker

At the end of the street a man stooped by age works in his garden. He has been a neighbor for the last 14 years and I am surprised at how old he must now be. For the last year, I have past through life largely not noticing those around me, save my immediate family. Now, I see the age in his face, in the way his hands tremble as they hold the trowel and I say to Devon, "I bet he's pushing 95, now." Alongside this noticing there's a sadness that creeps into my own step and colors what I see. And without warning I hear my own thinking:

This old man has outlived Rob by more than 30 years. Whole marriages, like mine, could be rolled into that span of time with some years left over. What might Rob and I have made had we been afforded 30 more years? Why weren't we? Why?

And it isn't that I wish my neighbor any malice, for after watching Rob die and these last six months, to wish anyone malice would be an anathema. Having known deep suffering there is no will to harm. Instead, I wonder whether design governs the length and brevity of our individual lives.

To be a sudden widow in your mid 50s is to question design.  It is to wonder about the necessity of meaning. To question the absence of God. And in thinking about all of this I am transported back to a graduate classroom nearly 30 years ago where Rob and I along with our classmates discussed Robert Frost's poem, Design. There we argued about the weigh and ambiguity of the closing two lines--"...What but design of darkness to appall?--/If design govern in a thing so small."

Indeed.

God factors in grief and death. My husband never expressed well formed or articulated views about God until he was days away from death. Then, he talked as best he might about God and an afterlife. He said what he was seeing was so other-worldly--a mesh of science and beauty and faith. Somewhere in a parallel universe, Rob told me he would be waiting.

Leave breadcrumbs? I asked.

And so I was not too surprised when I asked him late one night, "Do you believe in God?" and he answered quickly with a voice unwavering, "Of course. Of course there's a God."

II.

My life has been entwined with Rob's since that late summer afternoon when we sat opposite one another in a writing class. Being a widow at first meant trying to parse my life from his. I thought working through grief was about separation. Now I know that such attempts are more irrational than not. There is simply no way to do this. To be married to Rob was to make together something sturdy, aesthetic, loving, complex, simple, contradictory, vital, surprising and above all--vulnerable. For isn't love more about vulnerability than not?  Grief tugs at the familiar, rides alongside it revealing the roots of a strange and oddly necessary symbiotic relationship. The familiar fuels grief as it fuels grace. So, is it no wonder that I am reminded of Rob while awake and while dreaming on a constant basis? These days I understand that there is no running away from what has formed me.  I learned the deep lessons of love alongside my husband.

Now, most moments are infused with memories of Rob and thoughts about how Rob might react to something occurring. I think of this as Dev and I get into the car and leave behind the older man in his garden.  On the radio SoundCheck is playing, I am brought back the the townhouse Rob and I lived in 28 years ago in Fort Lee--that apartment where we could stand on our balcony and see the top of the George Washington Bridge. I recall bits of a conversation we had then. This was when I first learned about John Schaeffer's immense knowledge of contemporary music. Rob was such a fan and now most weekdays when I hear Schaefer on local public radio I think about those young newlywed days in Fort Lee.

Or earlier today I am sitting with a teacher--a teacher Rob worked with in prior years--and she references him, as do I throughout most of our conversation. At one point we talk about channeling Rob and there is great happiness I feel from this acknowledgement of him. Or earlier this morning when I stopped in at a local Starbucks and the barista tells me how much she likes the necklace I am wearing and I thank her, knowing that it was a gift from Rob to mark our 24th wedding anniversary--a gift that was so unexpected. A few years earlier Rob and I had decided to stop buying gifts for one another. We didn't need, nor want anything. The last few Christmases were spent donating the money we might have spent on one another to others. We agreed that those were the best holidays.

Friends, I am trying to make meaning amid the shock and tears and frankly I am not succeeding. What I know today could be slipped into a back pocket and lost. A well loved life and a deeply loved man are both a source of comfort and grief, solace and rue. When death parts lovers so early, meaning is hard to come by.

SOL16: Seeking Lazarus

I. 

I've been listening to Oprah and Deepak's Getting Unstuck: Creating a Limitless Life. This is a 21-day mediation experience that is happening now.  Each day Oprah and then Deepak provide some centering thoughts related to helping listeners get unstuck by connecting with untapped creativity and then providing time for meditation. Each session lasts for about 20 minutes. The purpose is to help uncover how to compose a creative life through some centering thoughts and meditation. Since, I have come home from France, I have been listening. The focus for the first week is on how to be in the present moment. In week two, the focus is on choosing expansiveness, letting go of the past, and living creatively. In week three, sharing the spirit of creative awareness with others is the focus.  

There were several things I heard during the first week that I especially wanted to remember--ideas I appreciated and yet quarreled with.  On day 3, Deepak said: 

"Stuckness keeps us from accessing our creative potential, which is our birthright. To begin a more creative way of life some basic points are important. First stop comparing today to yesterday. Look upon every day as a new world, because in truth it is. Only are stuckness makes it old."

I found the idea of not comparing today to yesterday to be a bit alarming. I can't think of a day that has gone by where I have not compared my days with Rob to the absence of him in my life now.  As I listened to Deepak speak, I thought that neither he nor Oprah could have experienced what I am experiencing and so his directive to stop comparing today to yesterday must surely be for other situations, not mine. 

The more I listened, I began to realize that often I was agreeing, but I also found that I would qualify what had been said when it might require me to live more deliberately and move on from the loss of Rob--to not hold myself in some waiting pattern as if Rob was coming home. And this idea of waiting for Rob to come home made me stop and ask, What is it I would have him do when he arrived? I had no immediate answer.  And so I told myself that the ideas professed by Oprah and Deepak were quite sound and that these ideas did not always apply to me. For example on Day 4, Oprah quoted Eckhart Tolle:

"Life will give you whatever experience is most helpful for the evolution of your consciousness. How do you know this is the experience you need? Because this is the experience you're having at the moment."

I thought, Yes, that can be true, but not for me now. Not at this time. Surely these words are not meant for someone who has suffered the loss I have. Surely this tragedy is not a help in any way. 

I conflated not comparing today with yesterday with requiring me to forget all about Rob. I also thought that some experiences, such as the death of a husband, are too tragic to ever serve as object lessons. Somehow my words began to ring a bit hollow and doubt entered. I began to question if perhaps, just perhaps, some of what Oprah and Deepak were saying might also apply to me even as I resisted the two ideas. It wasn't until I got to day 7 that I realized that living brilliantly as Rob asked me to do requires first and foremost, that I live and be responsible for my life. 

Yes, live.

On day 7, Oprah asked,

What makes one person react to bad news with grace and dignity, while another person experiences the same news with a sense of hopelessness, resentment, or anger? Why does one person get stuck while another uses the moment to make changes and reorient   his or her way of being in the world?  Our perceptions. Our perceptions paint our personal realities...As the author of your life, you can rewrite the story by changing your perceptions. That's a key to getting unstuck...

Years ago on a classroom wall, I quoted a line from Hamlet I found pertinent. Hamlet is explaining to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern about the relativity of thought.  Hamlet concludes,  "...there is nothing either good or/bad, but thinking makes it so." 

Hmm. 

Perhaps there were lessons here I needed to heed.

II.

Saying out loud that living, brilliantly or otherwise, requires me to be present in my life is a step towards wholeness. 

A big step. 

I must be responsible for my life. I realize that I have wanted Rob to be responsible-- from the grave--for my happiness. Even as he lived, he was not responsible for my life, my happiness although I have surely placed that responsibility in his hands these last few months.

I have forgotten that happiness and contentment are not the absence of grief.  For the longest time I have been waiting for my dead husband to return and remedy my grief.  I have been waiting for my own personal Lazarus to arise and take this responsibility from my hands.

But being responsible for another person's happiness is not a definition of love. Love is far less selfish. And though Rob loved me, he was neither able nor responsible for my happiness. That rested in my own hands.  It rests there presently and no amount of wishing can diminish that truth.

Grief cannot be remedied. It is not diminished by the number of activities done, the trips made, the sacrifices accounted, the good deeds done, or the events attended. None of these make a critical difference when it comes to healing. Rather, healing is determined by the perceptions I hold regarding the relationship between Rob's death and the quality of my life.

Only I am responsible for my life. 


III. 

Collage made from pages altered by Citra Solv
(M.A. Reilly, July 2016)

Earlier today I was playing around with pages I had altered through Citra Solv and I made a collage. The main figure reminded me of Beowulf and I thought about a line by Leo Tolstoy from War and Peace when General Kutuzov says, "...there is nothing stronger than patience and time, they will do it all" (book 10, chapter 15 ). 

Patience and time. Healing requires both. Knowing I am responsible for my life is a big step. It is a big step that I will surely forget. 

Yes, forget.  

My intentions are often larger than what I can manage. A week from now, perhaps even a day and it will be as if I never wrote these words and I will need to rediscover them again.

And again.

Ahead of me are lots of rehearsals where I will remember the gift of responsibility and accept the ambiguity that accompanies it. 

I will remember and forget well before I more fully author my life.

#SOL16: Here and Then Gone

Somewhere Over the Atlantic (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

I.

38,000 feet below thick clouds that have severely roughened the air flight, the ocean is concealed. I imagine it nonetheless--the strong Atlantic moving, waves rising, cresting, and falling like a wild sea serpent plunging down and then resurfacing again and again. In the ocean, everything flows along currents to find beaches I cannot see, cannot name. There's an order to be appreciated.

Here lost among clouds that stretch like ghostly fingers across a coming dawn, I watch as if the shift in clouds might reveal you. I tell you twelve years of Catholic school taught me that heaven was largely a skyward business and I wonder if this is where you have come to rest, come to be.

And so I look for you among the ephemeral bits of fluff, but instead I see the head of a cow, perhaps a moo cow coming down the road for we may well be over Ireland and these clouds give way to a gnarly old man who seems befuddled, hunched over a cane. And then there is nothing.  Just like the clouds Berndnaut Smilde captures with his camera.

Here and then gone.

Here and then gone.

II.

Cloud interpretation is largely a geometry of faith--a language I cannot decipher. But even so, there is a simple joy that fills me as I stare out the window of this mostly silent airplane, winging east to Paris. We are less than 2 hours from landing.

I'm reminded that 17 years ago we tried to come here, somewhat keen on imbibing that old cliche of love. Paris in April. But instead we took those dollars and some more and paid for Devon's adoption--a surprise after so many months of waiting. We never made it to Paris, saying we would come here one day, just the two of us. We thought we had such time for who would know that a month after our son turned 17 you would be dead?

III.

Death is thick in Paris. I had forgotten how in Europe everywhere most everyone seems to be smoking. This is true for Paris as well. Young and old.  I look  and want to say, "Save your lives." I look at the young ones and recall you telling the oncologist that you smoked from when you were a teen until you turned 27. I look at the three young girls all puffing away until I must turn away and as I do I notice another group of three at a table nearby--all of whom are men and heavy smokers--all much older than you and I wonder how much of lung cancer is an unfortunate matter of genes. Your father died from lung cancer too.

IV.

Dev and I are here in Paris, Rob and there's a certain solace I find present talking to you tonight knowing somehow that this digital impulse will find its way to you.  Someone and I am sorry to say I have forgotten who said that there would come a time when I would be able to not only bare talking with you again, but revel in it.

Yes, revel.

3600 miles through roughened air I have come to learn a truth.

#SOL16: What Makes a Life Worth Living?

I was searching for a vocabulary with which to make sense of death, to find a way to begin defining myself and inching forward again. 

Paul Kalanithi, 2016, When Breath Became Air, p. 147.

I.

An important question that emerges alongside the diagnosis and spread of cancer is: What makes a life worth living? Faced with imminent death, the question takes on significant dimensions. Yet, it is a question not limited to the cancer patient only. Family and close friends also struggle to answer this question as well.

What makes a life worth living? What do we most value?  

For late stage cancer patients, like Rob, for whom no cure existed there is a dynamic that emerges as the illness progresses that alters responses to those questions. There is no single consistent answer. Across the last six months of Rob's life we each grappled with this question and I witnessed the enormous struggle he waged as he edged towards death. Facing death when he had fought so hard to live required a courage I had never seen.

There's an appointment I must keep, he told me a week or two before he died. I can't recall what it is.

I'm dying, Mary Ann. I'm dying, he said to me with such acceptance that I just rested my head on his bed and cried.

The combination of the surprising stage 4 lung cancer diagnosis we learned this past September and the immense and constant pain from metastasized spinal lesions and then the spread of cancer across the entire right side of his body shifted our priorities--invited us to look past what we once felt was important, and allowed us to rest our eyes more on the goodness we have sent and wanted to send into this world.

We are what we give. I learned that watching my husband die. So much of what we accumulated in our 28 years together was more burden than beauty by Rob's end.

II.

Now that Rob has died, answering the question, What makes a life worth living? nags at me--demands my attention. Why am I here?  

A life worth living is connected to the quality and quantity of goodness we produce, the brilliance with which we live our lives, and all of this is complicated by the often difficult understanding that conjuring a memory of my past life as a substitute for the new life I must now compose will not work. Such acts dishonor each of us. Wanting a life that cannot be had is not an answer to what makes life worth living for it denies life, and keeps me from embracing the ambiguity of what might be made.

So what am I seeking? What life is worth living?

I want to live well by giving more to others, using the handful of gifts and talents I have to do good acts. I want to be a terrific mom to Devon--to champion him and support his dreams.  I want to be a loving sister to my brothers. I want to love fully.

Mostly though, I want to honor my husband and the love we share by living deliberately. He'd celebrate that.