#SOL16: Restless

Two pages from my art journal, 6.9.16: She Had a Lot On Her Mind 

(acrylic paint, gouache paints, archival ink, pencil, gesso)

I.

There's a restlessness that comes with grief. Suddenly I become aware that my foot is tapping, or I'm walking about the house without intention. Grief is unspent energy. Some days I find it hard to concentrate and to attend to matters. Concentration happens best when I am working with children or teachers, walking/hiking, working in my art journal, or cooking. Intensity matters.  In a letter to his niece, Henriette Lund in 1847, Søren Kierkegaard advised,

Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being, and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it (p. 412).

Since Rob died I have walked each day.  This past week I got caught a mile or so from my car in a rain storm. I had forgotten how private it is to walk in rain. At first loneliness permeated my days. Now I find loneliness is yielding.  In Perseverance,  Margaret Wheatley writes how loneliness can transform into a willingness to be alone.  Two separate feelings. She explains,

Loneliness eventually transforms into a willingness to be alone, even a desire for the space and peace available when nobody else is there. But to get to this lovely place, we first have to let loneliness be there, wait for it to pass through, and then notice that it’s gone, that we quite like the space we’re in. 

It reminds me so much of Kathleen Norris's advice in Dakota: A Spiritual Geography about letting a place happen to you. Walking anchors me to the earth and soothes the loneliness by allowing me each day to commune with nature at the moment.

II.

It was just an old, oversized atlas that I found on a bookshelf at home when I was packing up a collection of books for teachers at a school. The atlas was Rob's and now it has become one of my art journals. I find working in multiple journals at the same time to be more productive. I can prep a two-page spread in one book and as those pages dry, I can work in a different journal.

I enjoy working on paper that Rob had handled. I notice how the maps and print bleed through the thin layer of gesso I apply and this often adds to the design and the ideas that emerge as I work.  I almost never know what I will be creating and the blank page is sometimes difficult.  Now and then I just go ahead and mark a few pages and this allows me to begin to see a potential narrative I night want to follow.

The journal is a place for self expressions and discovery. After Rob died, I needed to work with my hands.  The painting and collage making provide a means to ease the restlessness while focusing my attention. I often get lost in art making for hours.

My art journal is place for experimentation--a place where I can try out new techniques I am learning, invent methods, make lots and lots of errors, cover up mistakes (thank goodness for gesso) and start over again.  The work I am making is amateurish and there's a frustration to that and yet, there is also an odd satisfaction. The art journal also is a place where I work out things I may be feeling, but not naming.  It is sort of like my life after Rob. In many ways these last few months have been largely about practice, about acting as if.

At first, the weeks following Rob's death found me partially paralyzed with fear.  I seemed unable to make even the simplest of decisions.  In the time that has past though I am feeling braver, more willing to cultivate new interests.  I wonder if in seeing Rob die it hasn't liberated me from fearing my own death.  Rather than guard against death, I know that at some point I will die.  In some ways this liberates me to live more fully.





Work Cited
Kierkegaard, S. (1978). Søren Kierkegaard's Journals and Papers: Autobiographical, 1829-1848. Howard V. Tong and Edna H. Hong, Translators. Indiana University Press.

#SOL16: A Cardinal's Wing

Cardinal (M.A. Reilly, 2011)

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. 

Just keep going. No feeling is final.

Don't let yourself lose me.

                                    - Rainer Maria Rilke   

I. 

Before morning arrives, the riotous call of birds wakes me from the first true slumber I can recall knowing in months. There is an odd joy in being able to be wakened. It's been more than 9 months since Rob slept in this bed and yet, I still sleep only on my side, preserving that which cannot be preserved. I listen as the rain falls lightly beyond the wide opened bedroom windows. In these moments between night and day, time is best measured by the rise of darkened shadows against the far bedroom wall as the whole room seems to breathe and gradually lighten. Where are you, Rob? Where are you?

Most nights my sleep is a very muddled affair; interrupted by a restlessness that keeps me company night and day.  I am in a constant state of anticipation.

And today will be no different--a day spent with Jane, walking beside her in woods, by ponds, and through gardens where the peonies are already starting to bud. Everything is too early this year. Too brazen. Too bright.  

I realize as we walk that the excited flutter I keep feeling is me anticipating Rob returning home as if he has been away for a weekend, or has spent the night before at a hotel he found just off the interstate in Maryland and is now heading North, heading home. These thoughts flash like bits of sharp light--momentarily seen--only to be blinded by the more difficult truth: My husband is never coming home. 

II. 

"I want him to come home," I blurt out, surprised too by my outburst as Jane turns towards me. And before she can speak, I am recanting.  

"No, No, I don't. I don't want him to return to that bed." 

Jane nods, confessing how she too hated the hospital bed Rob lived in for the last 21 days of his life--how she hated the way it filled the whole first floor of the house like some cancerous growth.  

"Wherever you sat or stood you could see that bed and Rob in it," Jane tells me. And for the first time I see how my husband's illness and death has weighed on her. 

After Rob came home to die, he would say to me most mornings, "Okay, help me to stand up so I can get into the bathroom." He would say this as he tried to lift the weight of his body from the mattress as if he might actually sit up on his own.

Each morning I would gently remind him what he wanted to forget: he had lost the capacity to walk two months earlier. 

"Just help me up then. Help me to stand," he would say forcibly.

"I can't, Rob. You can't stand up." 

He would look confused, baffled and now and then he would say how he must have forgotten. 

"I forgot. Imagine that. I forgot."


III.

Much later in the day after Jane and I have returned home, we are drinking wine on the side patio in the too perfect spring dusk. And I feel grateful when the wind picks up and the air chills, sending me inside to retrieve an Irish shawl I can only imagine Rob must have bought for me some years earlier. 

Why can't I recall the simplest of things?

And returning to the patio, shawl in hand, Jane and I will laughed as she reminds me of the sheer absurdity of how we sat in her car in the darkened parking lot of a neighborhood Starbucks an hour or so after Rob died, waiting for Devon to return to the car with some water for each of us. I had forgotten all that. I must confess that I have forgotten more than any wife can remember or bear. Even now, I am hearing my brother send us from the house that evening so Devon and I would not be there when the men from the funeral parlor, the men sent to retrieve my husband's body, arrived. 

Across from me, across the span of lawn and late day light I watch as a cardinal resettles itself on three separate branches in a thicket of trees that edge our property. I pull the shawl closer. Where are you Rob?  

I look for signs as I walk each morning, each evening. I look for signs of my husband as I sit with a glass of wine in hand as if the atoms that made up his corporeal self might now be bits of sky, or leaves, or the sudden movement of a cardinal's wing in flight.