#SOL17: The Widow and Mr. Trump

Grief (M.A. Reilly 2016)

I.

I had to look away from my laptop.
I had to.

Watching the attention Mr. Trump placed on the widow of the dead Navy Seal felt like a car wreck I came upon suddenly, without notice, and as much as I wanted to look away, I also feel drawn to witness. Yes, to bear witness to Carryn Owens' pain.

Widow to widow.

But I failed and I couldn't look as it raised for me the pain of my own husband's death that happened nearly a year ago.  I turned my head and said a quick prayer that Ms. Owens' shock and pain might be lessened somehow--but I doubted it. I wondered if the loneliness she is just beginning to name wasn't more pronounced in that hall with hundreds standing and cheering. After those present, those who had been standing and cheering sat down, their lives would continue on unabated. They will not carry this loss beyond that moment. Carryn Owen's life has been altered tragically. After the applause she remains the widow and now a single parent.

Those who have not lost a husband--who have not lost in the flash of a moment their imagined and desired future, cannot possibly understand that even the most well intentioned and politically-free talk will not cure what hurts beyond expression. Words will not heal. Someone who should not have died is dead and nothing said in that room will alter that reality.  Carryn Owens' surrounded by so many others is painfully alone.

II.

Today, I had more courage and watched the exchange. I saw her lips moving as she look skyward and remembered in the moment how I had gazed skyward as I communed with Rob. At those moments I needed his support especially when the kindness of others undid me. I wondered what story Mr. Trump wanted the presence of the widow to suggest.  Her grief is so new, so raw, so personal, so lonely. What were we to make of that?  And why? What's the narrative here?  What did Trump mean when he directly addressed Ms. Owens' and said,

 “And Ryan is looking down, right now, you know that? And he’s very happy, because I think he just broke a record."

When I heard him utter this, I could not imagine he was talking about the applause--as if something so fleeting, so banal might be a source of the serviceman's happiness. There is nothing happy here for this family.

Why put her on display? And before those of you say she had free will and accepted the invitation--I would say that much of the weeks following a shocking loss are weeks where decision making is impossible.  Yes, impossible.

A few days after Rob's death, after everyone went home and Devon went to high school, I sat in the dining room of our home for more than two hours staring out the window unable to make decisions about the most routine of things. Pay the electric bill?  Call EZ-Pass to begin to have the account shifted from Rob's name to mine? Contact our insurance company to stop coverage for Rob?Send a death certificate and copy of the will to the car company so that Rob's beloved car could be transferred to me? Make dinner? Do the laundry?

Every action reinforced my husband's absence.  In the quiet of the house I did not want to hear he was gone as I kept expecting him to come through the front door.  In short, I was a mess and as I imagine is true for most widows I was also so very lost, so very vulnerable and frankly unable to be responsible for most anything, save my son.

Why didn't Trump simply acknowledge the immense sacrifice of the Owens'? Why display the widow?


III.

As I wondered about Ms. Owens, I recalled the Republican convention last summer and the moment when 4 parents, one after another, spoke about their dead children and blamed either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama for their children's deaths. It was politicized speech stuck onto the backs of the grieving and as I wrote then, it made me ill. Call me cynical, but this speech by Trump also felt manipulative. There has been speculation about the readiness and support for the Seal team in Yemen. But also significant, there is the complete absence by our commander in chief, Mr. Trump, to accept responsibility for a mission that went wrong. A mission that resulted in the deaths of Chief Petty Officer William Owens and 20 civilians, including women and children. Mr. Trump, only a few days ago, publicly stated that it was "the generals" who lost Owens.  He seems to have washed his hands.

Yet it was Trump, and only Trump, who sat that evening over dinner with his son-in-law, political advisor Bannon, Mattis, Dunford, Pence and Flynn and green-lighted the mission. The president gave the go ahead and should be responsible as presidents are for the outcome.  Instead of bearing responsibility we are left with Trump blaming the generals and displaying the widow.

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

This is not presidential.
This is cowardly.

#SOL16: I Could Not Follow

from my art journal: 6.3.16, (gesso, acrylic and gouache paint)

“Absence is a house so vast that inside you will pass through its walls and hang pictures on the air.”
                                                                                                ― Pablo Neruda

I.

Most days I try to remember what Rob and I were doing a year ago.  I try to call up a day prior to Rob's diagnosis of cancer as if calling up such a memory might restore a bit of what has been lost.

How were we living our lives? With what intensity did we greet life? Were we as complacent as Emily from Our Town says all humans are? Did I make time to show Rob how much I love him?

I check the calendar and note that a year ago, Rob and I were at a school in Newark. More than likely we drove together as we did most days, stopping on the way in for a cup of coffee and to drop Devon off at school.  Last June was a super busy time for both of us as we were completing work for three clients that involved lots of teaching and curriculum planning sessions. We were in a rhythm and looking forward to the long stretch of summer ahead.

II.

A year later and Rob is gone and in that immense absence I am weakened, unsteady, broken. I have bargained with God until I'm mostly mute and I see now that the passage of time does not ease the pain, does not make the loss of Rob any easier.

Sorrow remains. Well planted. Vocal.

III.

Keep busy I've been told, but know this: No series of activities can fill the gap his absence leaves. Rob is the missing weight from my life, the familiar love I turned to over and over again across the last three decades.

The weight of the paint on the brush, the word on the page, the voice of a friend--these sometimes anchor me to this earth, this life, this unknown place that I now reside.

#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.

#SOL16: No Parenthesis

Dark and Light (M.A. Reilly, Massachusetts, 2012)

I.

There have been so many firsts this past week concerning our son and Rob's absence is always so much more present during these times.  He missed Devon getting his permit, visiting the first college with his son, taking 2 days of driving lessons, driving in the passenger seat of the car as Dev drove, and watching him pack a bag for a trip to Boston he will take without us. It's also been a tough week for Devon.  In the absence of school, he feels the loss of his father more.  We are hurting and I know we will continue to do so.


This pain circles back to more thoughts and I say, often aloud, that I will not, cannot allow myself to feel all of this, but I do. Not feeling is like trying to stop a river from running, from finding its own edges of containment. This pain is both blessing and curse, but even as the pain wells up I trust it is more blessing than not.  e.e cummings told us all, "since feeling is first..." And so it is. The thoughts that clutter my mind, break my heart are mostly of Rob passing. Sometimes it's an object that triggers a beautiful moment from our past--a sweater that smells like him or a pair of sunglasses I find in his car. And sometimes it is some other small imperceptible matter that opens me up to sorrow such as the way the late day light fell across the sofa 20 minutes ago and I remember Rob calling me in from the kitchen to see a similar light fading last October.

"You have to see this. Such an orange ball of light," he called to me. And drying my hands on a cloth, I am more pleased now to remember that I came to sit inside with him and watched.

But now, pain blooms too quickly. At these times, I try to speed the memory in an attempt to lessen its impact by seeing where it ends, where its devastation leaves me. But this does not work and I travel back to examine it, pick over it like an obsessed scientist dissecting a worm.

What did we talk about? I can't recall. Was I really present? Was I thinking about the dishes and if I had put up the dishwasher. What if I had known that this evening in October would be the last one we would watch the sunset, might I have been more present? And so on.

Rob's last hour on earth is seared in my mind like a loop I replay and it hurts to recall the slant of his head, the loosened jaw, the rattle, his eyes, only partially shut like a garage door that doesn't quite close all of the way. What was he seeing? What was my sweet husband minutes from leaving this earth seeing? Even now, the recollection wounds, my stomach clenches, my mouth grows watery, and I think I'll be sick.

II.

This is a man who should have lived a long life. He did not. And most days I have trouble getting past that bold truth regardless of the flight of days that distance his death from now on a calendar. Time no longer works as it once did.

Poetry helps some and I smile a bit when I finish reading the e.e.cumming's poem--a poem I have read countless times and tonight its closing line strikes me differently than ever before.

                                            ...Don't cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph 

and death i think is no parenthesis

No parenthesis

#SOL16: Driving Permit

Devon getting ready to drive...

Dear Rob,


Today was so bittersweet. I finally took our son to take his driving permit test--the test you had planned to take him to last August before you became ill.  We arrived before the agency opened only to have to return home because I forgot the 6-points of identification. My mind these days is a bit vacant. When we returned to the motor vehicle agency, we waited on several lines for a couple of hours and finally Devon was issued a permit and was then ready to take the written test. I know how proud you would have been of him. He passed the test, had his permit stamped, and on the way home I found a large abandoned parking lot for him to practice driving. I held my breath a lot and only once had to yell, "Break!" No worries the concrete wall was at least 5 inches away (I kid you not). I so tried to channel your calmness as I sat in the passenger seat.

So you know, I don't hide how I am feeling from Devon. To say we have been devastated by your death is to understate the obvious. Today though, I did.  Although Devon mentioned you and how the day brought up your absence, I checked my tears as I didn't want to mar the excitement he was showing. Our son deserves a few light hours and days given the last 7 months. After dinner tonight (homemade tacos to celebrate), Devon practiced driving some more and he seemed to be picking up the feel of the steering wheel and breaking a bit more smoothly.  I know you would be glad that both of Devon's uncles reached out to congratulate him on his permit. So many people have stepped in trying to fill the holes your passing has left.

Tomorrow, I'll contact a driving school. Tonight, I'll cry a bit for all you are missing and for the holes that just can't be filled.

I love you,
Mary Ann

#SOL16: Saved Voice Messages

Want (M. A. Reilly, 2009)

Everything was as it should be, except that it wasn’t. We were living in two worlds. The old one, which never seemed more beautiful, had not yet vanished; and the new one, about which we knew little except to fear it, had not yet arrived. From Afterword by Carole Blue (Hitchen's widow), p. 97. (From Mortality by Christopher Hitchens)

I miss Rob's voice. I have kept a dozen quick messages he sent to me between January 11, 2016 and February 12, 2016 saved on my phone. All of the messages were sent in the early morning and I realize now that Rob was less coherent by evening, even as early as December and so he had stopped phoning me later in the day.

Now that he is gone, I sometimes take out my iPhone just to listen to him speak. I get through 2 or sometimes even 3 messages before I am crying so hard and loud that I can't hear his voice. I don't listen to the messages in order as the idea of a narrative would be too much to bear. Rather, I select random messages and even though I don't want to, I still can hear his death approaching as the weakness of his voice increases. By the third week of January his voice is weakening. In that message I hear him say he is scheduled to have a cat scan later that day. I don't recall being startled or even concerned by this when I first received the message that January morning. Truthfully, he seemed to always be having some type of test of other. What I did not know was this test would reveal the spread of cancer to his sternum and right rib.

And even though the January 28th message is difficult, it is the first message from January 11th that mostly stops my heart. It's the one where Rob tells me the oncologist was just in to see him. "We're in good shape," he tells me with such conviction I can't help but believe him, even now months later when I know that we were in poor shape, knocking-on-heaven's-door-shape. Rob asks me to put a reminder on my calendar to call to the oncologist's office by February 1 in order to set up a chemo appointment for that week. It is an appointment that I will never make. He closes the one-minute conversation by saying, "We're about to begin the real race."

How prophetic.

On that morning his voice is still strong, determined. He does not know that in 30 days the same oncologist will tell us that the cancer has progressed, metastasizing to Rob's sternum, ribs, spleen and liver.  There will be no more treatment. Opdivo, the wonder drug, he had been scheduled to take instead of chemo the week earlier but could not because of a fever will not be given now as he likely would not survive the treatment nor would the treatment have enough time to work.

His case is now terminal.

Would you consider being on life support? the doctor asks.

Immediately Rob tells him he will not be hooked up to a breathing machine.

A couple hours later as we wait for my brother to arrive with Devon, a young resident comes in to make sure we understand that Rob's diagnosis is terminal and that he has a week to four weeks to live.

Five days to four weeks to be precise is what he tells us.  He will repeat this several times as if repetition best ensured successful completion of a given task. At some point during one of his repeats, I ask him to leave. "You aren't helping us," I say as kindly as I can muster. What he doesn't know is that we are all so far away from that room, waiting for our 17-year-old son to arrive so we can tell him that his dad is dying and there is nothing left to do medically. We will be breaking his heart.

The end when it came was so final. So declarative. More so than anything I have ever known. I don't have words to convey the difference between the moment before death and at death is like. I held Rob's right hand and Devon held his left hand. 40 minutes after Rob died, Devon still sat there, bent over his father's body, clutching his hand. 

#SOL16: The New Normal

Downtown Columbus, OH (M.A. Reilly, iPhone, 2016)

Devon and I were in Ohio this past weekend, attending a Counter Strike tournament which sported a $1,000,000 prize purse and had teams from around the world competing. I know almost nothing about the game or the teams that competed. Devon began schooling me last week as we watched a few matches at home and I quickly began to get a handle on the teams, the objectives, and some of the strategies. E-sports are big in our home and before Rob died he told me that I needed to step in and support Devon in his interest in this computer game like he would have.

At the Tournament

Months ago this tournament was announced and it was the first time a Counter Strike major tournament was being held in the United States. Devon plays on a team and competes and so he was excited about it being relatively close to home. Unfortunately with Rob sick at the time we couldn't commit to going and though Devon is 17, he is too young to rent a hotel room. Like most things, Devon understood all of this and said it wasn't a big deal, but Rob and I each knew differently. With all that was going on with Rob, he and I forgot about the tournament and Devon didn't bring it up again.

A couple of weeks after Rob died I asked Devon about the tournament and if it had happened. He told me it was happening the first week of April and I asked him whether he still wanted to go. He was able to secure two tickets and we made the trip here. At that time when we were having these discussions most everything scared me. Losing Rob undermined my capacity to make simple decisions and to take almost any initiative. Even as I felt paralyzed, I recognized the need to act nonetheless. I have traveled all over the world with and at times without Rob. Traveling from the east coast to Ohio was hardly a sojourn. It felt important to do this and be here for Devon and so I booked the flight, arranged the hotel, and actually had a very good time with my son. It has been a long time since we were able to get away and though I had a few weepy moments thinking about how much Rob would have enjoyed this with his son, overall the long weekend went well.

This is the new normal. In getting on with living, Devon and I need to create new rituals, new memories. Nothing is harder and yet, nothing feels more necessary.  And though it may not seem like a big deal, going to Ohio this weekend was a start.

#SOL16: A Widow's Guilt

self portrait (feb. 2016)

Let me tell you a secret.
Something you don't know
but something I tell myself.
Often.
Daily.
Now.
Here.
Shh.
I'm Omnipotent.

I should have been able to save Rob,
to save the man I have loved for so long,
to save my teenage son's only father,
but I didn't.
I didn't.
I failed.

I should have known the first hospital
was a grave error,
that the surgeon was a mistake--a careless man
who cannot own his own hand in this.
But I was mute on the matter.

I should have stopped Rob
from returning to that hospital in late September
and taken him somewhere else,
somewhere better, a teaching hospital.
But, I didn't do that and although the death certificate
lists lung cancer as the cause of death,
my husband's death was largely caused
by multiple staph infections,
especially the one that went untended
and kept him from the cancer treatment.

I should have raised my voice more
and said,  No, 
when spinal surgery was put on the table.
I worried quietly that the surgery
would delay cancer treatment
and that Rob would run out of time.
And he did.
He did.

I thought if I kept
everything moving,
everything clean,
everything orderly,
whole foods cooked
and served
and cleaned away,
windows washed,
laundry cleaned and folded,
floors swept,
garbage out by 7:30 a.m.,
son to school and home again,
bills posted and paid
that he would be okay.

I thought if I
was responsive,
available,
attentive,
action-oriented,
relentless,
spirited,
loving,
problem solving,
on the case 24/7
that Rob would live.
But he did not.

I thought if I implored God:
Save him, God. 
Save him and I'll do anything. 
I'll do everything.
Whatever you deem necessary. 
I'll be that burnt offering on a mountain, 
your modern-day Isaac
willing to be the sacrifice
that my sad prayer
would save him,
but it did not.

To be a widow
is to know
such torment.
I failed you.
I lived
and you did not.

#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.