#SOL16: This is Love

Winding Home (M.A. Reilly, South Dakota, 2010)

Yesterday, I posted about being undone by the loss of Rob and how I walked across the street to a neighbor for comfort. I was such an emotional mess. I am reminded here of my Aunt Alice who aways kept a tissue or two up the sleeve of her cardigan.  I was a box-deep-in-tissues-messy. Feeling this way, especially in public, is uncomfortable.

What I want you to know, what I feel compelled to say is that the walk across the street, allowing myself to be so vulnerable publicly, was an action propelled by being well-loved. Yes, well-loved. This is a gift my husband gave to me. It is truly a gift that keeps giving.

During the 28 years we were together I learned with Rob how being vulnerable is a bridge to love. Rob is the first person I let in emotionally. Being vulnerable meant that I would love him and I knew he would hurt me. Vulnerability meant that even though I would and did hurt him, he would also continue to love me. Vulnerability was being my imperfect self, my very flawed self with Rob. During those 28 years, I learned that I did not have to be good to be loved. My husband did not have to be strong to be loved. Love did not have such requisites. Our love, like ourselves, was so very imperfect. Our wounds were doors we could and did walk through, for our wounds revealed more about ourselves than those who might have wounded.

I am reminded here of teaching Louise Glück's book of poems, Ararat to graduate students at Teachers College in Manhattan some years ago. I opened the study of literature course by distributing pages from Ararat. Students had time in class to read the poem they were given and determine how to read it aloud to the group. Then we performed the poems in the order the poet arranged the book. I wanted the students to hear the arc of the book--to understand that the arrangement of poems is itself a poem. Tonight though, I am thinking of the closing poem, "First Memory." It reads:

Long ago, I was wounded. I lived
to revenge myself
against my father, not
for what he was--
for what I was: from the beginning of time,
in childhood, I thought
that pain meant
I was not loved.
It meant I loved. 

All this practice at love with Rob (and marriage is often a lot of practice) helps me now when when my place in the world feels less certain, when possibilities feel foreign, when wounds from such immense loss fester. The ways in which I have learned to love and be loved help me now when I am emotionally messy, when my need for others is so very high, when I am not 'getting better', when I am so publicly imperfect. Rob's love for me, our practice at love for so long, my understanding of how love alters, deepens, becomes less complicated, simpler--allows me now to take the steps I choose to take to heal.

#SOL16: Ice Cream and the Widow

(M.A. Reilly, 2014)

The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream. - Wallace Stevens

I.

It was just a spoonful of ice cream. Häagen-Dazs--coffee--to be precise. I had reached in for ice and stopped short as a rush of anxiety waved over me. For a bit of time, I just stood looking at the container, studying it as if it might reveal some hidden truth.  And then, I was seeing beyond it, recalling it was the last thing I fed Rob three days before he died.

You want food? I asked Rob, so surprised to hear his request and oddly overjoyed. It was midday on Sunday and friends were over. Even though I knew that not eating was a normal part of dying it was so hard for me to honor this.  If you came over next Sunday, one sure thing I would do would be to offer you food and drink. 

I looked at him and noticed that he was nodding his head. I knew he hadn't eaten for more than two weeks and I worried how eating now might make him vomit and then thought about what food he could even swallow. He had a spoonful of ice cream the week before.  

How about some coffee ice cream? I asked knowing it was his favorite. 

Excellent, he told me in a voice that may well have belonged to a British Lord. 

And so I fed him tiny bits of ice cream and he ate just about a large teaspoonful before signaling he was done. 

When Rob came home from the hospital it was mid February. He stopped eating food by the fourth day. He lived another two and a-half weeks.

Simple acts are ladened by memories.

II.

Last night, I closed the freezer door soundly knowing I could not eat, nor could I throw out the pint of ice cream.  For now it just sits there. This is what it is like these days.

To be a widow is to be confounded.

Yet, the difficulty I find in making most decisions is tempered now and then by a stronger need to put my emotional house back in order. I want to decide on this pint but know that tonight this is a battle I will not take on. And so the ice cream remains in its spot in the freezer and I once again am feeling grateful to know somewhat--the limits that test me.

III.

It might surprise you to know that the average widow here in the United States is in her early 50s. I imagined I was much younger than the average and now find that this commonness of age I share with so many others is oddly comforting.

Tonight, as I walk away from the freezer and out of the kitchen shutting the light behind me, I stop for just a bit knowing there are other women, elsewhere, widows just like me, staring into freezers unsure of what next to do. This is a sisterhood born out of death. This is a club no one wants to join, but most will.

Death of the man you loved--the man with whom you marked decades, raised children--this heartache cracks you open while demanding a new birth.  And it is the complexities that cannot be unravelled regardless of effort that humbles me most.

I know so little.

Beauty is born from such vulnerability and love finds expression in that which perplexes us most.