#SOL16: I Did Not Die

Stopped (M.A. Reilly, Leonia, NJ, 2012)

I.

Sometimes the distance between the hard earth I am resting on and the sky above is one my eye cannot calculate, cannot clearly discern. Other times, the sky presses so close that I think surely my exhaled breath is helping to form clouds that drift just out of sight.

Everything moves.


II.

When I began writing about the diagnosis, about Rob's too sudden death, about what my life was mostly like during his illness, what it felt like right after his death, and now what it is becoming, I made a promise to tell the truth as I understood it--to not back away from unpleasant thoughts. I wanted an untainted record of the last year. Here in this digital light, I wanted to tell you what it means to be unfinished, to be both scared and courageous, to feel slight against the crush of pain, to utter what is mostly unnamable and to feel a flicker of possibility.

Yes, possibility.

What I could not know during those last days with Rob when I sat beside the hospital bed watching him sleep, looking out the rear window to our yard and the woods beyond was how significant space would become in the months following his death.


III.

Here's a slim truth I understand now and again: The death of your lover, your spouse, the father of your child, your happy-ever-after is mostly a disquisition about collapsing space that is folded and unfolded sometimes at will.

As Rob was dying, the world contracted and grew so very small until the drone and spit of the oxygen machine became the very breath we all took and exhaled. The whole house became attuned to the intake and exhalation of that mechanical breath. We breathed as one unit, a syncopated composition, until on that late March afternoon, we stopped like a flipped switch.

I thought not breathing meant we all had died.
It did not.


IV.

After Rob's death, huge vacancies assembled. Where once there had been flesh covering bone, now I was largely jagged openings, holes you could drive a fist through. Across three decades, Rob and I became more assemblage, less solo bodies. After his death, my body was broken; a mere tracing of the places where I had loved and lost my husband.

In the weeks following, little stuck to me: words, deeds, thoughts, feelings came and went. I was more drifting cloud than hard earth. What little ground I did find in those odd nights and days felt spongy, less solid, less known to my touch.

I so wanted to be all better and I was not. I wanted to be handed the map of my life and told go this way, now. And out of this unattainable state, a restlessness grew and grew until standing in it was so unbearable that I found myself trying to out-run my life and failing.


V.

Each morning I walk. I walk because I must. I walk so I can hear what I need to say and what I am saying now is that "I am not content to be a mere tracing of my life."

I am not content.

Not content.

There, I said it.

And though this feels like a betrayal for moving on, living means leaving the past behind, leaving the fiction. I cannot stand in the world where Rob remains alive and live.

If Rob helped me to know anything during our life together it was this: to replicate the past like a loop gone mad is not to live.

When I walk I tell myself, Don't mistake the tracing for a map.


VI.

And what feels uncomfortable to say out loud, what still feels like betrayal of Rob's love is that in acknowledging this discomfort, this malcontentedness, new spaces are emerging. I am alive. I did not die in early March even though my heart felt stopped, my breath felt gone.

Lately, I sense spaces of opportunity blooming like wild irises that I have suddenly come upon while out walking. These flashes of beauty move in and out of my range of sight, momentarily bridging the vacant spaces within me like strings of lavender and yellow light tossed against the darkness.

Clouds drift.
Starlight flickers.

Each new space arises alongside the odd marriage of wife-widow-mother-woman. I am a complication composed of hard ground, drifting clouds, flickering stars and such uncertainty save this: I did not die.

I don't know what I am becoming and for now that is good enough.

#SOL16: Longing

Happiness is the Longing for Repetition (M.A. Reilly, 2009)

In a tree by the brook, there's a songbird who sings,
Sometimes all of our thoughts are misgiven. 

      -- Led Zeppelin

I.

Lately, the birds gathered by the front door seem mostly crazed. New neighbors, who moved in the day after Rob died, cut down two old growth trees--home to any number of birds. Now they who are without a home are trying to make something new.

Most days, birds swoop in and out of the yard, gather on wires that criss-cross the street, and land on and alight from branches of the hemlocks that line our front yard, while others--far more audacious--gather on the front stoop, refusing to leave regardless of who approaches. My friend, Christine, insists that one bird, the one who does not leave, is some spirit of Rob.

The light leaves later each day. And all around me life pulses. Most days I notice. I watch.


II.

Tonight the wind came out of the west with a sudden fierceness and tree limbs broke and fell landing with a loud enough crash to startle both of my brothers and me. A few minutes later, a rainbow briefly appeared in the southern sky and on the back deck, Jack pointed to a small piece of blue shell. Above it the nest remains, empty now.

Sometimes, I think we all are seeking what we might call home. It is all so temporary though.


III.

Each day, I listen for Rob as I walk--noting with a certain curiosity the sudden whistle of the wind, the drone of a distant leaf blower, the call of birds and neighbors as I walk by.

Each night I look for my husband as if he might be playing a bit of hide and seek alongside the clouds that obscure and reveal the moon.


Like Whitman, I know Rob stops somewhere waiting for me.


IV.

This is how it is.
For now.

#SOL16: Be Curious, Be Attentive

Life Guard Chair (M.A. Reilly, 2015)

I. 

A friend sent me a link to an interview Maria Shriver did with poet, Mary Oliver back in 2011. When asked about how she was faring after the death of her long term partner, photographer Molly Malone Cook, Oliver replied:

Mary Oliver: I was very, very lonely.
Maria Shriver: You've written in your work that you rarely spent any time apart. How did you avoid being crushed by losing her? 
Mary Oliver: I had decided I would do one of two things when she died. I would buy a little cabin in the woods, and go inside with all my books and shut the door. Or I would unlock all the doors—we had always kept them locked; Molly liked that sense of safety—and see who I could meet in the world. And that's what I did. I haven't locked the door for five years. I have wonderful new friends. And I have more time to be by myself. It was a very steadfast, loving relationship, but often there is a dominant partner, and I was very quiet for 40 years, just happy doing my work. I'm different now.

Oliver says that 6 years after the death of Cook and I am heartened by her decision to live deliberately. These choices she highlights--to hide away or to make a life and unlock the doors--confront all of us who have lost their long term partner. And I suspect if I could talk with the poet, she might also say that although her decision to boldly live holds true, the inclination for more solitary acts also beckons after such loss. And perhaps it is this need for the solitary that led her to publish the book, Our World, a year after Cook's death. 

II.

In Our World, Oliver compiles images Cook made, journal entries, and alongside these offers commentary--more prose poem than essay. What I find interesting is Oliver's observation,

"The end of life has its own nature, also worth our attention. I don’t say this without reckoning in the sorrow, the worry, the many diminishments. But surely it is then that a person’s character shines or glooms."

It's her line about attention that interests me, stops me. When Rob was dying a friend, Monica sent me a message that simply read, Stay curious. At the time the two words baffled me. Rob was newly home from the hospital. After 50 days away from home, he had come home to die. For the 21 days Rob was home, Monica's two words stayed with me, kept me company as I would sit next to Rob, especially through the night. In some fundamental way, all I had was the decision to stay curious as I kept vigil while Rob restlessly slept. Staying curious was a way to make sense of what was happening and it led to an important way to connect with Rob and to calm the fear.

Oliver and Monica offer wise words. The end of death deserves our attention, our loving curiosity.

Be attentive. Stay curious.

During this time with Rob, I watched as he remembered he was dying. There's an appointment I need to keep, he'd tell me. He described dreams of travel gone wrong. He told me one morning that he couldn't figure out how to cross over--how to leave this world for the next. A few days before he died, in what would be one of our last conversations, he told me he had figured it out and that when it was my time to cross over, he'd be there to help me. He described the immense beauty of the next world. He referenced seeing my mom, his father, and a group of men all of whom were waiting for him. He spent hours, making what appeared to me to be imaginary things. His hands were busy adjusting levers. Engaging gears. Making screens to watch.  I'd like to think he was building what he most needed to transport him from here, from Dev and me to the next world. Throughout all of this, I talked with him, listened to him, loved him. And it was this attention, this curiosity that helped to bridge the increasing distance between Rob and me as he readied himself for his death and the next world.

III.

My husband confronted death as he lived--full of courage, grace, and humility. I might have not witnessed that had I not been alongside him those last three weeks, attentive, loving, and so curious. I wanted, needed to know what he was seeing, hearing, learning.

#SOL16: The Promise of a Red Rose Boutonniere

Devon at 14.

This afternoon, I took my son clothes shopping.  This is a very unusual situation as I can count on a single hand the number of times we have shopped for clothing since Devon became a teen. But these new clothes are for a prom he'll attend at the end of the month.

While we were at the store and later, I thought of Rob. To die a quarter of a century too early is a definition of loss. I thought of all my husband will never see and it makes me so sad.

Devon in a new suit.
New dress shirt.
New shoes.
New belt.
New tie.

The promise of a red rose boutonniere.

How you would have laughed, Rob and taken such joy in our son who has grown taller than both of us and holds on dearly to all those lessons of love you taught. Thank you for that and more than I can say here.

#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: Acceptance is Slippery

Devon at 6 months. Rob took this picture. We got little sleep then.

I am writing a response to Bonnie who commented on another post and I find myself writing about acceptance.

Acceptance is slippery. I filter many events and situations through the acceptance of Rob's death. Today is mother's day and my husband is not here with us. Each event and many small inconsequential situations pull me head first into the reality that Rob has died. I thought we would have at least another 25 years together. I hope acceptance comes. This is very hard.

Acceptance is slippery, elusive even, especially on holidays. I am realizing that most every event gets filtered through the truth that Rob has died. Rob is dead. He is no longer here with me or Dev. And though these are often gut wrenching thoughts and days, it is the small seemingly inconsequential happenings that slay me most.

For example, today on my way home from the transcendental meditation class I am finishing up, I stopped at our pharmacy to get Allegra D for Devon. He took the last pill this morning. He suffers with seasonal allergies this time of year and though they end as quickly as they arrive, he is now in the thick of it. At the pharmacy, I learned I could not buy the over the counter medicine. Due to a federal pseudoephedrine drug statute, the amount of product sold over the counter is limited by the amount of pseudoephedrine that can be purchased in a month.  Having bought a 10-pill package 10 days ago, I have hit the limit.

Denied.

In the past, this was never an issue as Rob and I would take turns purchasing Devon's allergy medicine. Now with Rob gone, there isn't anyone else at home who can help. Next year Devon reminds me that he will be 18 during allergy season and with a license he can purchase the medicine himself.

So I was a bit lost standing in the pharmacy wondering how I was going to make sure my son had the medicine that most helps him right now. I was quickly remembering the year Devon spent 5 days in the hospital due to a severe asthma reaction to seasonal allergies. Then, Rob and I took turns sleeping in the hospital next to our son. What could I do today? Understanding the dilemma, a person who was also at the pharmacy told me quietly that she would buy the allergy medicine for me and we could exchange goods for cash outside. This person's kindness undid me and after giving her cash for the purchase and taking the small bag in hand, I sobbed all the way home, having to turn off the road and sit for a bit before traveling on.

I felt so lost and yes, I felt sorry for myself, imagining so many celebrating the day with families intact. But feeling sorry isn't something I do for any length of time. It is simply too destructive. So after crying a bit and returning home, I decided to take a walk and even though I was an emotional mess, I stopped at my neighbor's home across the street and she hugged me and listened. Touch matters so. For awhile, I just couldn't stop crying. People's kindness seems to make me cry more. What with it being Mother's Day, my mom's death anniversary this week, and of course, my husband's death two months ago today I was a mess. I hadn't even noticed today marked two months since Rob died. I think the body knows what the mind blocks.

Devon's gift that I love.

The anniversary of my mother's death has often hit me hard. Last year in April, I wrote about her passing in the post, What it Was I Was Listening For and back in 2012 I wrote about her death in the post, Loss is the sound without word.   Rob helped me through my mom's death--immediately after and in each of the fifteen years he lived beyond her. During the last two years, he helped me to see that how I respond to her death each year is a choice I make and last year, Mother's Day was peaceful and one I spent gardening. This peacefulness that Rob helped me to achieve was a gift I could not know then would be so special.

This year crashing into Mother's Day and feeling the loss of my husband, I found talking with my neighbor helped. Being vulnerable, sharing the pain is cathartic. We stood outside in her garden and I cried off and on and we just talked until the tears were gone. Awhile later, I was on my way to walk, feeling calmer, more settled. When I returned home, Devon and I talked and it was a delight when the bell rang and I received a gift from my son--fresh fruit from Edible Arrangements.

I want you to know that there is no consistent recovery from a husband's death, especially a husband who dies several decades early. The shock obliterates. There is little emotional consistency at all in my life. I cry every day, but I find these days that I only sob out of control 2 or 3 times a week. The only way through this immense loss is to continue to feel what I feel, to talk it out, to write, make art, love my son, and walk. I realize as I write this that in the time since Rob's death I could have walked nearly to Montreal as I've walked so much.

Grief makes life unsteady. I'm reminded of the mantra Rob lived by: The only way out is through. 

#SOL16: Art Collaboration 3 - "...Whose Name is Forever"

Everything That Was Broken (R. Cohen & M.A. Reilly 2o16)

This is work that is part of a series I am creating that combines art Rob made during the last few weeks of his life with new work of mine. I did not know the Mary Oliver poem until Tara Smith quoted it as part of her response to an earlier post I had written.  I was so taken by the poem and thought about the thousands of poems Rob and I shared.  Oliver's  poem expressed so much of what I want to feel.