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.

#SOL20 - A Doorway: Notes from the Pandemic

Trying to Find Home (M.A. Reilly, Watercolor, Mixed media)

I.

On Thursday night he went home. He wasn’t feeling well. That week, like past weeks he worked as he had for decades as a plumber in a school system.  By other people's accounts he was an honorable and kind man, skilled at the work he did.  

By Saturday his wife had gotten him into a hospital. By Monday afternoon he was dead.

I think of him, a man I really did not know, just now know of, as he made his way through what would be his last week of life. He made his way through that week not knowing that he would never see another week.

I think of his wife who is making her way through this week.

II.

Loss is incalculable. At first it is numbing. There is no here to hold. There is a travelling of sorts that moves a body across the weeks that follow the death. The perfunctory is performed. The death is forgotten and remembered, forgotten and remembered, a tangle where the beginning piercing of pain shows itself.

Then there is the pain. 
It hurts in ways that steal the breath. It is a full body hurt.

And within all that hurt is a doorway--one that is impossible to actually know at the moment. Not knowing though, does not make it less real.

It is real and it requires us to walk through it.


David Whyte explains.

Pain is the doorway to the here and now. Physical or emotional pain is an ultimate form of ground, saying, to each of us, in effect, there is no other place than this place, no other body than this body, no other limb or joint or pang or sharpness or heartbreak but this searing presence. Pain asks us to heal by focusing not only on the place the pain is felt but also the actual way the pain is felt. Pain is a form of alertness and particularity; pain is a way in.

III.

America, like the rest of the world is poised at that doorway. Each death diminishes us. Each death is a weight we carry. The number of dead is numbing.  


IV.

The door we must walk through reminds us of what we carry in the here and now. It is an odd blessing to stand where your feet are.



Cited:
Whyte, David. Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words . Many Rivers Press. Kindle Edition. 

Keith

Dev at 3 in what was then our new home.

I.

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

"Know what?"

"Keith died a few weeks ago."

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

II.

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

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

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

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

III.

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

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

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

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

IV.

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

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

V.

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

Art I made after Rib died from his notebooks,

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

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

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


VI.

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

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

Then go and live boldly. 
Live brilliantly.
Live.

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.

#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.

#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: Waxing Crescent Moon

Crescent (M.A. Reilly, Rockport, Maine, November, 2012)

I.

Earlier last week, I removed the ring that Rob had placed on my finger all those decades ago. It was done with far less ceremony than when we first married. I removed it without hesitation. Sometimes you just know when it is right. And I knew without question that Rob was gone forever.

There's death, it's aftermath, and then there are those singular events that profoundly show what has been known, yet not truly felt.

My husband is dead. I am not.
Life pulses on.

II.

The months between Rob's death and now, have revealed a new understanding of what it means to be a parent. No longer can I turn my body into Rob's and seek answers through touch. No longer can I pass parenting to Rob, knowing he will care for Dev. Now, the joys and challenges of being the only parent are all mine.

Some days it's lonely here without Rob--other days, less so.


III.

After a week, an imprint of my wedding band remains. For years I have been wearing that slender bend of a waxing crescent moon wrapped tightly around my finger.

Now, that young moon is gone and only the pale glow remains. 

#SOL17: Hard Work

What I Meant To Say (M.A. Reilly, 5.1.2017)

Dying is such hard work, as is bearing witness and living afterwards. Before Rob's death living was not a burden, was not work.

In the weeks before death, Rob became less and less earthbound, so often staring beyond the here and now at what I did not know, could not name. We, who had been so connected across the decades, so much in one another's pocket, were no more. My husband would forget both home and name as agitation and restlessness gave way to more and more sleep.  In the days leading to death, only sharp pain would cause him to yell my name aloud. Mary Ann! The first time it happened I didn't realize he had even called my name after not saying it or any other name for days. It wasn't until my older brother pointed it out that I realized some part of Rob could still retrieve my name.

Against these dramatic changes was the knowledge that a handful of months earlier we were planning a holiday in Maine, untouched by the diagnosis of cancer and the failure of doctors and hospitals whose carelessness would alter our lives forever.

60 is too young to die.
17 is too young to be fatherless.
56 is too young to be a widow.

#SOL17: Unfinished

(M.A. Reilly, 2017)

I.

When he died, I felt lonely, not just for his physical presence in our lives but also lonely for the incomplete picture that was my life after he left. It’s as if someone took a pair of scissors and cut out half of the photo, leaving me unfinished.  -  Michelle Steinke-Baumgard  (from here)

Another death that happens after the loss of a beloved husband or wife is the death of "us."  At first it is subtle, not rearing its medusa-like head as shock and terror, loneliness and fear abound.  But in time, that loss of us becomes more prominent, noticeable. I was reading an article by Michelle Steinke-Baumgard, Who Should You Love After Loss?, that a friend sent to me and I realized that this second year after Rob died is largely about mourning the death of us--Rob and Mary Ann, Mary Ann and Rob--and all that our names joined together represented and promised.  And it is the promised that is hardest to look in the eye and not blink, or at least tear up. But it is also those promises of a future that will not come that must be let go.

Steinke-Baumgard writes about the space necessary to learn to listen to the self you are and are becoming. She writes,

To find these new ways to feel full as an individual, I realized I had to stop hating my alone time. Instead, I needed to see my alone time as the opportunity to meet myself, listen to myself and love myself. The quiet times are when I could hear the most from deep inside and find out who I was as an individual.

Whether we have suffered one loss or another or none that feel traumatic, the sense of being unfinished is largely human and remains with us,especially if we are circumspect.  Who we are is emerging, never complete, nor consistent. Even with Rob alongside, my sense of incompleteness may have felt less noticeable, but it was nonetheless present.  The person Rob met in 1988, is not the women who held his hand as he died in 2016. I think here of Kurt Gödel and the second incompleteness theorem. We cannot prove our consistency within ourselves. I think in many ways that is the power of love. Our consistency is often shown through the gestures, words, and actions of another in relationship to self. I learned about myself through my husband and others.

II.

The space where I quibble with Steinke-Baumgard is in the idea of a self being complete. I get what she is saying about learning to listen and to love yourself and I agree with all of that.  I think she captures all of this so well. I love the silent spaces where I can write and paint. These are more solitary, than not. I don;t think that everyone who grieves needs to embrace the silence.  For some this would be an anathema and would be more harmful than helpful. If I have learned anything these last two years, it is that the path after the death of a husband is multiple and what is possible is best defined by those doing the walking.

As I read the second half of the article, I wondered what being complete means. What did Steinke-Baumgard had in mind? Being complete is offered up without definition and that is problematic as it continues a myth that 'loving one's self' is akin to completeness. Further she says that we need to be complete before beginning other relationships. I was certainly not complete when I met my husband.

She explains that,

Grief has changed you, shifted you and transformed you into a new being, and while some might see that as a negative, I see it as nothing but beautiful and amazing.

This feels wrong to me.

Perhaps it is because I am a mom to our son who is now just 18 or that I love Rob and was loved so deeply and was nevertheless incomplete. There are pieces of myself that have not been transformed. There is a bedrock sense of self that has been shaken, but not broken. My fierce sense of love and protection of Devon was present before and after Rob died. My love for other people and interests I have had continue to exist. My sense of social justice is ever present--a commitment that has not eroded. I carry with me a belief in possibility and hope still remains.  I have a deep commitment to understand and love other--to become as Maxine Greene has penned, (other)wise. Yes, this loss shifts so much and leaves open new definitions of self, but there is something essential that also remains. To love and have loved one man for 28 years, shapes a psyche and a soul and even though Rob has died his touch and presence still (in)forms me.

III.

We are all unfinished. Whether we suffer the loss of a spouse's death or not, we remain unfinished. As scary as that may feel it is more truth than not.

#SOL17: Grey

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

I.

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

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


II.

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

But, we had other plans for that time.


III.

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

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

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


IV.

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

#SOL17: Give Me Things that Don’t Get Lost

Painting w digital remix (M.A. Reilly, 2017)

I. 

Those haunting lines from Neil Young's song, "Old Man" have caught my attention. Young sings,

“Love lost, such a cost.

Give me things that don’t get lost..." 

and I am nodding alongside him--as I too want things that don't get lost. I too have wanted the permanent.

II. 

What are the types of things that don’t get lost? What treasures do we carry that do not have the potential for wandering, migrating?  

Nearly two years ago I wrote that perhaps those people in your life who are your true North are the types that don't get lost. I was thinking about what sticks to you, what stays true through all the changes. A handful of months later, my true North would suddenly die and I would wear that loss like a glove that fits too perfectly, too necessary. 

III.

I thought heartbreak was the result of Rob dying. It was not.

IV.

During the last year, I could not seem to let go of that which was already gone.  The second after Rob took his last breath, he was gone from that body. I remember looking at him and thinking, This is not my husband. This is not my Rob. Nonetheless, I looked for him in all that was familiar, sought the comfort of his company when things felt new, and thought if I practiced being really, really good, he would be able to return. 

I'll tell you now that the main source of my heartache was not letting go of what was already gone.

V.

-->

Love doesn't get lost--even with death.  

It adheres.  

It is bone deep. 

As Devon would tell me one night when sadness was more pronounced than not-- Dad isn't gone, we carry him with us. He made us.

Love endures.

#SOL17: The Constancy & Curiosities of Love

Last Valentine's Day with Rob in the Palliative Care Center

I.

Today,  I am thinking of you who I don't know.

I see you waiting beside a bed--the lamp light casting a partial shadow on papers you have long forgotten you hold. Or perhaps it's your hand I see reaching to pick up a phone and silence the ringer. Noise shatters the near silence you have come to know. Or perhaps it is you who let winter's coldness in through the doors that still revolve as you rush beyond them into the well lit foyer of a hospital you know too well.

After the death, you may well wonder, how is it that you have found yourself here? Here where the shoreline fails to meet the edge of earth. Here where nothing is sure. Here where the widening space grows too big for your slight body to bridge. Here where machine sounds and the drone of 10,000 bees are impossibly loud. Here where you have forgotten the cadence of your own name.

This is what it means to know an ending, to accept the mortal limitations of self and the one you love.
You will not save him.
You will not save her.
You simply cannot do so.

And now, your life depends on knowing this.
Feelings will come later.


II.

If only 
If only I.
If only I could.

If.

During the last month of life, Rob struggled to breathe and I struggled to save him.
Is there anything as loud as the constant hum and drone of a machine pushing oxygen into lungs that will fail?
And they did.

I kept wanting to save him thinking, This. This is what I was born to do. 
I couldn't.
I didn't.

His life was never mine to save.


III.

After his death, it was a sound like distant bees buzzing that I recall. A long, dark tunnel raised up from the sea like Jonah in the belly of the whale and I knew the comfort and pain of dark interiors.

There were narcotics to be bagged for the police. Liquids drugs to be washed down the kitchen drain. The funeral home to call for transport and clothes gathered and bagged. Everyone seemed to have a job in the aftermath but Dev and me.

I had been so very busy for months.


IV.

Still. So still.

My son sat next to the hospital bed and held his dead father's hand between the two of his. I gathered the adult diapers, the incontinence pads, the medical gowns, the yellow tubes of hydrophilic wound dressing, the too-many-to-count bottles of bedside-care foam body wash, the never-used contour bed pan--all of the things my Rob would have hated and dumped all of it into the garbage. I watched until my son released his father's hand. That was my job, one I promised Rob I would always do.

Watch over Dev, he told me an hour after we learned he had just weeks to live.
Watch over our son. Love him for me. 

To keenly watch is a language of love--one Rob taught me. I have been practicing this way of noticing for the last 30 years.

Later when it was time to sleep I took my phone as I had for the previous 6 months of nights and placed it next to the bed.

The phone did not ring.
There would be no calls from Rob ever again.


V.

I couldn't quite drown the buzzing, not for weeks.
Someone later would tell me, nothing will be the same, and this is the one truth I know a year later.

Nothing is the same.
Nothing.
And some days I am the better for it.
Some days, not.


VI.

After the death,  it's the existential loneliness that most seems to cause distress. My marriage, like yours, shielded me from the truth that we are all alone.

Now loneliness seems sharper, more acute, in the absence of the man I loved and do love.

VII.

A year has past, folded itself and disappeared, like smoke, like ash.

A year later and I know like I know my own name that how I loved Rob in the years we had together and how he loved me mattered more than any charade of life saving I might have dreamed, surely desired.

We were so flawed in our love for one another.
So beautifully flawed.

And that slim truth--that our expressions of love were flawed, is what I hold closest to me these days.


VIII.

Dear friend I do not know.
Dear friend who now enters this club of widows and widowers--a club you, nor I,  hardly wanted to join--the buzzing will clear.
Clarity will return.
Sadness will be redefined as too-sharp moments.

And there will be whole days of joy.

I repeat. There will be whole days of joy.

And beneath that joy--your one precious life will bloom in ways you could not name today. And I hope this blooming brings with it a measure of peace, and something unexpected.


IX.

A friend sent me two words when I was losing Rob, when I was watching him die.

She wrote, Stay curious.

I have. And staying curious has made the most difference.

#SOL17: Redemption

Rob's Hand (March 2016)

Jeremiah 8:21-22. “I weep for the hurt of my people; I stand amazed, silent, and dumb with grief. Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why doesn't God do something? Why doesn't he help?”

I. 

I am speaking with the grief therapist yesterday morning when a new understanding of this pain surfaces. I am experiencing the last weeks of Rob's life for the first time. A year ago, Rob was still alive, still here. One of the things I would say to myself when I sensed panic rising during that time is that I could still touch him, see him, hear him, kiss him. This litany of things I could do brought comfort. 

A year ago, I slept little and ate less and walked through each of his last 20 days at home attentive to only my husband and his needs. I swore I would do all I could to ease--as well as I might--his passing from this life to the next. I wanted to comfort him. I wanted him to know the love I felt and hope that he did. Oddly this drive insulated me from the pain.

I realize now that so much was beyond my reach, my touch. Rob passed from here to there on his own as he had to--as you and I will one day do as well. 

II. 

Those last few days in the hospital, the week in the palliative care unit, and the 20 days at home are now (in)formed by the understanding of what happened next--what happened on that last day. Rob's life has an ending. And it is knowing that he will die on March 8th at 4:15 in the afternoon that changes how all the previous days with Rob can be understood. 

Time folds back on itself. 

I keep returning to that John Berger quote I mentioned in a post last week. In a conversation with Susan Sontag he says, "Somebody dies. It's not just a question of tact that one then says, well, perhaps it is possible to tell that story. It's because, after that death, one can read that life. The life becomes readable."  

With his death, Rob's life became readable.


III. 

It's reading Rob's life a year later--that life I loved like I loved the man, that feelings well up, swamp me. I feel sorrow grab and take hold for I see so much more now than I could have at the time.

I see now how impossibly lost my sweet husband was during those last few weeks. I see how vulnerable he was. How childlike he was at times. I see his sadness when he would remember he was dying. I see now, that he forgot so much. Each morning he would ask me to help him stand, forgetting the paralysis that kept him moored to that hospital bed. I realize now that he didn't think it odd that he was in a hospital bed in the middle of our family room. I realize now that I never noticed that before.

He began the leaving process well before he took his last breath. And it isn't only the last few weeks of his life that are refocused. No. Rather, it is every minute I spent with him. Every memory that resurfaces. All of them are now subject to illustrating the distance between then and when he would die.  It isn't that we climbed all over the Badlands one August, but rather that this happened five years before the diagnosis. It isn't that the time in Tuscany was spent wandering and eating well and laughing often. Rather, it's two years before the diagnosis. 

Every photo has a timeline taped to it now. And the photos with Rob and Devon hurt the most. I can barely look at those first photographs. We were so impossibly young and lovely. I wonder how Rob could only have a handful of years with his son. 17 years is too little time. 17 years is a quick breath in a lifetime.  


IV. 

And though remembering all of this hurts, I sense this pain is more redemptive than harmful. More solace than salt.

#SOL16: Healing

The Uncertainty Principle (M.A. Reilly, Ringwood - Devon, 11/23/2010)

I.

For years, I worried each time Rob went out to clear snow. The first time was at the house we were rebuilding, 60 miles outside of Manhattan. That year record snowfall occurred and by the season's end, more that 100 inches of snow had fallen. We were each in our 30s and years away from potential heart failure. When we moved to our current home, nearly 15 years ago, I worried Rob would die from a heart attack even though he wasn't yet 60. He was in his 40s and 50s here. Rob would laugh and always assure me that the machine did most of the work. I suspect there was some truth to that. Nonetheless, I didn't rest easy until the snow was cleared, we were all back inside, and the tea water was heating.

We all had our parts to play, but only Rob ran the machine. Now, it's been nearly two years since the snowblower was used.  Last year Dev and I cleared the one big snowfall in late January with shovels. Neither of us could figure out how to get the blower started and finally Dev said to me, "Mom, I could have had the driveway done by now." Later that evening we rushed to the hospital as Rob was being admitted.  He had been staying at an acute rehabilitation center.  He started to convulse, was unable to communicate well and was running a fever when a doctor explained that they could not care for him. By the time I would see him, he would be delirious. Staph again--the third time in four months. By now even I knew the signs. The only place Rob did not contract staph was at home.

The trip to the hospital was difficult as a blizzard the day before had dropped nearly 30 inches of snow and though the highway was mostly cleared, that night after the sun had set it was icy and one lane was still not passable. We were nearing the exit for the hospital when we saw the strobe of police lights and then a car upside down. Tragedy happens so quickly, as does grace.

Ten days later, Rob would still be in the hospital--in and out of intensive care. He never was able to come back to himself wholly after that last bout of staph. By mid-February we would learn, early one the morning, that the cancer had progressed and he was surely dying. A few weeks later he would die.


II.

This afternoon, as Dev and I were clearing leaves from the yard I thought about the many times I had worried about Rob and how ironic all that worrying was. Rob didn't live long enough for heart attacks to be a scare. He died so young. So quickly. One moment he had a sharp pain in his chest and the next he was diagnosed with advanced stage lung cancer. It seems ironic as I never saw my husband smoke. In the nearly 30 years I knew him he was never a smoker. He had stopped years earlier before I met him. I listened as he told doctor after doctor his history. He began smoking as a teenager and stopped in his mid twenties. Every doctor would stop the recording of notes and sigh and say something like, Well, that was enough time. Just thinking about his absence, our loss leaves that sick hollow feeling to churn in my gut.

Most days, I move through time partially living.  I am waiting even when I move. It's as if there was a huge rubber band attached to my heart and though I venture out each day, there is always something tugging, some inner tension pulling at me until I remember.  It's as if I am caught in an in-between time. I watch life happen--a boat on a river passing by and I am moored to the shore. And though I do what needs to be done each day, I am ever grateful when the day ends.

Healing, I now know is tied up with desire.  It is not only the passing of days--although time does help. It is the want to live that matters. Now that the shock of his death has eased, I realize I no longer scream in the car as I drive. I haven't for months. Most nights, I sleep. Nightmares are rare. I no longer avoid Rob's office. And though the pain of my husband's death feels acute, I know now that the situation is not unusual. Yes, I am a widow in my mid-50s. Yes, I am now a single parent. And none of that is unique.

Beneath all this tumult, what remains more constant than not is how the yearning still hurts,still catches me unaware. And though it happens not as frequently or as prolonged, the intensity has not dulled.


III.

For a moment today as we cleared the leaves, in the late light of mid-November, I looked up at Devon standing so sure and tall. I looked at him standing in the last bit of sunlight and I saw a glimmer of his dad. I stared until I had to look away.

Already, we are moving on, I thought. Already, we are making new memories. To leave this waiting room is to acknowledge life moves on without Rob.

Everything moves, even me. And, friends, I would be lying if I said this healing didn't hurt.