#SOL16: Love as Location and Stance

I.

One birthday some years ago, Rob handed me a slim wrapped package to open. He and I celebrated birthdays one day next to the other and so it was not unusual to find one or the other of us opening a gift in mid November. That morning I unwrapped  a copy of Seamus Heaney's District and Circle--and with no classes to teach that day, I watched my husband and child leave for work and school and then sat down with a cup of tea to read that 76 page masterpiece.

And masterpiece it was. In the poem, "The Aerodrome," Heaney says that love is both location and stance and is shaped by the bearings taken. Heaney closes the poem by writing:

“If self is a location, so is love:  

Bearings taken, markings, cardinal points, 

Options, obstinacies, dug heels, and distance, 

Here and there and now and then, a stance."

II.

It's ironic how lines of poetry return almost dusty when we most have need. This is a year where I have learned a primal definition of need.  In a year of wild and dashed hopes, Heaney's insistence that love is both location and stance rings truer than any other time I can recall. I have always had a fondness for those lines even though I found them to be a bit baffling.  But tonight their meaning is clear.

When I think about love, my first instinct is to think of it as a verb. Love locates. It lifts and roots us to the here, the now, filling us as it empties--a slight nod to Escher's Waterfall. Love as verb resituates the impossible. But Heaney is so much more the clever artist and he wants us to think of love as noun.

If self is a location, he tell us, so is love. There's a conditional logic there to be envied and the use of a colon lays it out for us. Our stance with regard to love--the stance we take is predicated by the bearings we have taken, the geographies we have composed, as well as the options and obstinacies we have named and lived and out of all of this now and then emerges a stance we take and it is that stance that locates love.

The last year, the geographies of self and other, husband and wife, father and son, widow and son, presence and absence, love and loss have been nothing less than an opening-onto and a distancing-from. The death of my husband has left me worn, introspective, and terribly mindful.

III.

A year ago this Wednesday night I held Rob's hand as we sat side-by-side in the hospital's imaging center while waiting for Rob to be taken for a CT scan.  We chatted quietly now and then so aware of others in the room--a room where no one's chatter sounded weightless. Mostly, we were quiet. It was early evening and even though we knew that there was a chance something might be wrong with Rob, neither of us ever entertained the idea it could be life threatening, let alone, cancer. We were taking off at the beginning of the next week for our annual Maine holiday--a trip we never got to make. That night, the scan was done quickly and then we were off to dinner--just the two of us. We spent a good portion of the evening talking at a table for two and then listening to music. Devon was off at a friend's house spending the night. Neither Rob, nor I knew that this would be the last night we would ever spend together outside our home just the two of us.

Early the next morning, we learned Rob had cancer and 6 days later I would sit on the hard plastic chair in the surgery waiting room for 7 hours as Rob underwent a VAT procedure. Devon would vacillate between sitting in the waiting room and sitting in the hospital cafe. I refused to move as I was told this is where the surgeon would come to speak to me. The surgeon had told us the surgery would be about an hour. It was not. Rob would spend that night and most of the next day in intensive care and I would spend the night after that with him in his hospital room as he was so disoriented and scared.

Nothing would be the same ever again. Nothing. And I think this is what Heaney had in mind when he wrote about love as a location and stance. Heaney's notions of love are not concerned with the particulars of the story I tell here, but rather with the ways we respond--the stances we assume. Throughout the next six months, our stances were united, kind, loving, responsive, present.

Within the first 72-hours of the initial diagnosis, I quietly watched multiple lectures about lung cancer treatment late at night and by the time Rob was wheeled into surgery that following week I had examined the most recent statistics I could find about cure rates and lung cancer.

I was scared to death, realizing my husband might be dead by late winter.

At that time we did not know what stage cancer Rob had but we naively thought it must be stage 1 as he seemed so asymptomatic, so healthy. We would learn that it was stage 4 nearly by mid September. By then I would know that his chances to live were very slight.  I kept this to myself, never saying those words to either him or Devon and I would nod in agreement when Rob thought his chances were rather good. As the weeks wore on I began to believe that if anyone could beat this awful disease, it would be Rob.  He was so hopeful, so willing to do what must be done. He was so courageous. But error after error occurred and with each doctor mistake, my husband's chances for life waned.

IV.

I didn't know it during those terrifying months when each week brought with it some new life-threatening calamity to confront, but now I realize that there's a bit of grace that accompanies such a ferocious stance. I did whatever he needed to save him until I learned that saving him was no longer possible. Then I learned to privilege his comfort. Even when we were just minutes from learning the prognosis was now terminal and that Rob would likely die within a matter of weeks, his immediate concern was for me and Devon. I still find that amazing. And isn't that what love as location and stance is mostly about?

Love isn't about being blind, but it is about the way we chose to be present, even at highly stressful moments in life.  Love is largely about the stance we adopt. My stance, like Rob's and Devon's remained constant: whatever Rob needed we all did. Sometimes it really was that simple. By March the medical bills had grown beyond 6 figures and I had stopped working nearly two month prior so that I could care for Rob. The Hospice social worker told me she would try to get Rob into some facility and others supported that action. It is impossible to convey with these words how insular life becomes when days and nights are spent caring for the man you most love who is dying. Now and then I could find the occasional hour of sleep, but days went by without any rest. That night I sat next to Rob as I did each night and the house quieted and I looked at him and knew I needed to set aside the financial worries. I believe now that it was love that powered me as I had mostly stopped eating alongside Rob and sleep was rather rare for even when I did try to sleep I spent the time mostly awake.

Love is a stance--the attitude we accept/take/create/commit to.  But here's the thing I  most want to let you know.  It isn't the common definition of stance that most interests me tonight.  It's the secondary one. Stance also means "a ledge or foothold on which a belay can be secured." That's the power of love.

V.

No one in my life has ever loved me as my husband chose to do each day and it was by his side that I learned through experience the deepness and stability of love. Love did not come with conditions. What we have borne these last twelve months has given shape to the love that finds me tonight--a love that brings both tears and comfort. And I am in need of each.

#SOL16: Design

I.

from my art journal: Widow (gesso, acrylic paint, ink, pencil)
based on an image by Pam Carriker

At the end of the street a man stooped by age works in his garden. He has been a neighbor for the last 14 years and I am surprised at how old he must now be. For the last year, I have past through life largely not noticing those around me, save my immediate family. Now, I see the age in his face, in the way his hands tremble as they hold the trowel and I say to Devon, "I bet he's pushing 95, now." Alongside this noticing there's a sadness that creeps into my own step and colors what I see. And without warning I hear my own thinking:

This old man has outlived Rob by more than 30 years. Whole marriages, like mine, could be rolled into that span of time with some years left over. What might Rob and I have made had we been afforded 30 more years? Why weren't we? Why?

And it isn't that I wish my neighbor any malice, for after watching Rob die and these last six months, to wish anyone malice would be an anathema. Having known deep suffering there is no will to harm. Instead, I wonder whether design governs the length and brevity of our individual lives.

To be a sudden widow in your mid 50s is to question design.  It is to wonder about the necessity of meaning. To question the absence of God. And in thinking about all of this I am transported back to a graduate classroom nearly 30 years ago where Rob and I along with our classmates discussed Robert Frost's poem, Design. There we argued about the weigh and ambiguity of the closing two lines--"...What but design of darkness to appall?--/If design govern in a thing so small."

Indeed.

God factors in grief and death. My husband never expressed well formed or articulated views about God until he was days away from death. Then, he talked as best he might about God and an afterlife. He said what he was seeing was so other-worldly--a mesh of science and beauty and faith. Somewhere in a parallel universe, Rob told me he would be waiting.

Leave breadcrumbs? I asked.

And so I was not too surprised when I asked him late one night, "Do you believe in God?" and he answered quickly with a voice unwavering, "Of course. Of course there's a God."

II.

My life has been entwined with Rob's since that late summer afternoon when we sat opposite one another in a writing class. Being a widow at first meant trying to parse my life from his. I thought working through grief was about separation. Now I know that such attempts are more irrational than not. There is simply no way to do this. To be married to Rob was to make together something sturdy, aesthetic, loving, complex, simple, contradictory, vital, surprising and above all--vulnerable. For isn't love more about vulnerability than not?  Grief tugs at the familiar, rides alongside it revealing the roots of a strange and oddly necessary symbiotic relationship. The familiar fuels grief as it fuels grace. So, is it no wonder that I am reminded of Rob while awake and while dreaming on a constant basis? These days I understand that there is no running away from what has formed me.  I learned the deep lessons of love alongside my husband.

Now, most moments are infused with memories of Rob and thoughts about how Rob might react to something occurring. I think of this as Dev and I get into the car and leave behind the older man in his garden.  On the radio SoundCheck is playing, I am brought back the the townhouse Rob and I lived in 28 years ago in Fort Lee--that apartment where we could stand on our balcony and see the top of the George Washington Bridge. I recall bits of a conversation we had then. This was when I first learned about John Schaeffer's immense knowledge of contemporary music. Rob was such a fan and now most weekdays when I hear Schaefer on local public radio I think about those young newlywed days in Fort Lee.

Or earlier today I am sitting with a teacher--a teacher Rob worked with in prior years--and she references him, as do I throughout most of our conversation. At one point we talk about channeling Rob and there is great happiness I feel from this acknowledgement of him. Or earlier this morning when I stopped in at a local Starbucks and the barista tells me how much she likes the necklace I am wearing and I thank her, knowing that it was a gift from Rob to mark our 24th wedding anniversary--a gift that was so unexpected. A few years earlier Rob and I had decided to stop buying gifts for one another. We didn't need, nor want anything. The last few Christmases were spent donating the money we might have spent on one another to others. We agreed that those were the best holidays.

Friends, I am trying to make meaning amid the shock and tears and frankly I am not succeeding. What I know today could be slipped into a back pocket and lost. A well loved life and a deeply loved man are both a source of comfort and grief, solace and rue. When death parts lovers so early, meaning is hard to come by.

#SOL16: Time

I.

Watercolor on Yupo Paper (August 2016)

I wonder how long it will be? How much time needs to pass before I no longer feel that sickening shock when I acknowledge that Rob has died. And it is shock--not that he is dead, but rather that he died. I realize that those might seem like the same statement, but they are not. I still can't believe that someone so good, so young has died. Yesterday I was food shopping when I felt my stomach sour as I realize that the package of fig bars I had just put in my cart I didn't need. It was something only Rob loved--something I would routinely buy for him. There are habits of the heart and habits of the body we cannot outrun.

II.

Yesterday, I felt blindsided--unprepared for the sadness that felt so heavy. I was shaky at times as if the adrenaline I felt was an untapped river flowing. I hadn't experienced this since the end of last April--almost two months after Rob's death. And last night I thought how the more time moves along the harder it all seems to feel.

Time passing is hardly reliable.

III.

A few nights ago Devon and I sat together talking about his dad. It was a tough, emotional evening. We made some time to just talk about what Rob has meant to each of us.  I mentioned how intense the feelings of loss suddenly are again and Dev reminded me what I had told him shortly after Rob died. I said then that the intensity of feeling doesn't ebb much over time, but the duration and frequency does.  I was telling Devon how I felt after my mom's death and he reminded me of those words again last night.

Time bends, he said. What's longer: A year? A day? 28 years?  Time is relative. It's how you spend that time that gives it shape.  We're lucky to have had the time we did with Dad.  You've said this to me. You lived so much. You and dad didn't wait to live. 

No, we didn't and I am grateful, I tell him. But truly I wanted another 28 years.

IV.

These days I know that gratitude doesn't remove sorrow.  It may soften it a bit, but sorrow remains like a river flowing. Sorrow is more aquifer than pool. It moves beneath me as I walk through each day, surfacing at breaking points, yet always present. 

#SOL16: Potential Energy

(M.A. Reilly, 2015)

I.

You would think after the passing of many months, I would not lose hold of the plot. Rob is dead. There I said it. Wrote it down. Put it in print. Sent it out over this field of digital impulse and energy so I can hold what I most want to be untrue. My husband is gone. With such attention, surely I would hold on to this truth. But most days, I do not.

Most days the awareness that Rob has died sneaks up on me. Subtle, like the quick shift from wife to widow. Like yesterday I was driving home from a New York college where I am taking a weeklong course. I had been very occupied for 8 hours making handmade papers and using these and some found papers to craft a series of collages. On the way home I stopped for a red light and the thought of showing Rob the work quickly surfaced followed as quickly the realization that I could not. This sudden truth felt like emotional whiplash. Rob was not waiting at home for me. I would not come in  through the garage as I had done for the last 14 years and find him at his desk downstairs, tinkering in one of the many notebooks he kept.

Even now as I write this, his desk is still covered with the work he was doing last summer. The notes he stuck to a large board remain. His chair sits ready for him, angled just as he left it. Even the fingerless gloves he kept for those days when the cold ached him are by his keyboard. All of this remains. All remains but Rob and the truth of that still stuns me.

Readiness is a farce. No amount of preparation will yield what I most want or soften what I know and feel.

II.

For the last several weeks, I have been dreading the one year anniversary of when we learned Rob had cancer. August 20th. I have been dreading this day because it will make Rob's death more final. Dying is never a singular act for the survivor. Every late afternoon Rob dies. Each morning I resurrect him. I do this without mindful intention. I do this because my mind seems to know what pain my heart can bear.

For now and the next week I can still look back to the year before when we had no knowledge of the awful disease that was wrapping itself around Rob's spine and infiltrating his vital organs. These days were the last days of innocence when we moved through life never expecting that Rob would not see spring.

Tonight I cannot recall any of the words from our last conversation. I cannot even recall when that conversation occurred. Well before Rob's final breath, he had moved into a light coma state. Even during the early morning hours of the day he died, he called out as his lungs filled, panicked by the struggle to breathe and I quickly called the Hospice nurse who talked me through how to clear the mucous from Rob's airway. For the next 14 hours, I would sit beside him, rest my head on his bed, try to inhale him as his body unwound like the spent spring of a clock uncoiling.

I imagine if Rob could have narrated those ending moments he would have talked to me about the transformation of potential energy to kinetic and somehow this offered explanation would have sounded so much more like a story you have always hungered for but never named. My husband adored explaining the ins and outs of science and literature; music and life.  I can imagine if he were here I might ask him to tell me the story of the dark side of the moon. And without any rehearsal, he would launch into a tale about gravitation and angular momentum and somewhere in this tale there would be a line or two he recited from that old Pynchon story, Entropy.

I miss the man who could cull together Meatball Mulligan's lease-breaking party, thermodynamic theory, Henri Lefebvre's production of space and the breakdown of capitalism all the while sipping some tea.  Some days the mystery gets revealed--or at least an outer layer.  Entropy tells us that everything will slow down one day.

#SOL16: Just 6 Days

.

Wolf Waiting (M.A. Reilly, cut and torn paper collage, 2015)

I.

To the left of his desk were a pair of brown thongs, Rob liked to wear. I came upon them accidentally a few weeks ago when I moved a bag Rob had used to carry his computer. Who would have ever thought that a cheap pair of shoes could cut so deeply?  As I stood looking--looking because I felt I must--I realized that Rob had likely slipped them off sometime in mid-September on the day he contracted a staph infection. He discarded these shoes with the easy care of one who expects to return to them another day.

These finds are private glimpses at grief. These are the moments when invented dialogues and imagined events flood the heart.  To grieve is to hypothesize, to dwell in possibility--Dickinson's "fairer House than Prose." Each omission, each slanted truth helps us to rewrite the death of our beloved as a more comfortable truth we can fit into a back pocket. But these truths lose purchase when we confront the unexpected, inconsequential object, like discarded summer shoes. For it's the rather small things found suddenly that allows us to see that our loss is too hard to calculate, to quantify, to wrap up neatly. I can still see Rob's feet in those sandals, recalling how he enjoyed kicking them off as soon as he got home. Tonight, I am imagining he slipped those sandals from his feet in mid-September after seeing the surgeon. That afternoon we entered our home through the garage downstairs. I went upstair to the main floor of our home while Rob likely lingered downstairs in his office.

II.

Last week, I looked around Rob's office--a space we have shared these last 14 years--and saw him in the trinkets and pens and notebooks that still remain. There are notes he left on his desk that I have not had the courage to remove. It's as if they wait there for him to return. There are notes he scribbled that are attached to a curriculum board he was working on when the diagnosis was learned. My husband was always scribbling notes. He left behind 40 years of notes and 50 notebooks and frankly I don't know where to begin.

Three weeks ago, I finally packed up his Joyce books--the multiple copies of Ulysses he wrote in and sent them and other books to New Hampshire for Michael to keep. It seemed what Rob would want. Among the Joyce books I found two copies of Minne and Moo paperbacks--stories Rob delighted in reading to Devon when he was a young child. Oh, the laughter at bedtime as Minnie and Moo found trouble and friendship and escape and love. As I held the books I wondered why Rob had tucked them away. What was he thinking?

My husband was a man who loved his son. I imagine Rob wanted to savor those days when he read to Dev at night before curling up beside him.  More nights than I can count I would find Rob snoring away next to Devon--both of them asleep.

In a week it will be the one-year anniversary of when we first learned Rob had some type of cancer. How odd and cruel is it that he's been dead for half of those months? My husband went from walking around in the world able bodied to being a tragedy in 6 days.

Just 6 days.

We had 6 normal days after that initial diagnosis before the speed of the infections and illness undercut every forward step we tried. Nothing was ever able to reset the illness, to clear a path through the too many battles with infections and blood clots and narcotics. And still, every time, yes every time, I think of his death, my stomach sours and on some of those days I am violently ill. Every day the shock of his death feels new.

III.


In September, I'll return to work in earnest again. I stopped working full time in November, tapering the days I worked each month to a number I could count on one hand.  And so now,  months later I want to believe it is time to return, but I know this too is more story than truth for there is no returning. If I could manage such a trick I would surely do so.

But would I really?  Would I want to travel back in time? It hurts me to say, No. Not that.

Though I would be greatly tempted to return to the past to just glimpse a moment of Rob--once I recall the terror, the brutal pain he shouldered, the way the narcotics altered my sweet husband, his sadness and confusion, and how I watched him day-by-day edge more and more out of the frame we once called out life--my desire to see him, to touch him once again wanes.

C.S. Lewis in A Grief Observed questioned his desire for his beloved wife to 'come back'. He wrote:

What sort of a lover am I to think so much about my affliction and so much less about hers? Even the insane call, ‘Come back,’ is all for my own sake. I never even raised the question whether such a return, if it were possible, would be good for her. I want her back as an ingredient in the restoration of my past. Could I have wished her anything worse? Having got once through death, to come back and then, at some later date, have all her dying to do over again? (p. 32).

For the last six months I have been playing a date game.  I have spent time these last months recalling what we were doing a year ago on let's say: March 9 or April 2; May 14th or June 10th and so on. I have attempted to resurrect some sense of innocence I had known before death came knocking. On September 11th of last year, a Friday night, Rob took a tank of oxygen with him and we went out to dinner at friend's home. How could we ever have known that it would be the last social outing we would ever take? Rob would never again leave the house for any reason other than medical and by December 30th he would never walk again.

Catastrophic illness forces a family to reside in the present moment.  Looking backwards makes every past moment more important than it was when lived.  Imagining a future is something that quickly leaves when the diagnosis is terminal. Rob and I did not live as if it the passing moments could be a last day.  When Rob edged closer to his death, I sat up most every night next to the hospital bed, holding his hand, murmuring reassurances, and feeling so damn hungry to find an end to this misery.

#SOL16: Regression

from art journal (M.A. Reilly, 2016)

I.

With grief, regression occurs. No matter what direction forward seems to be there is no straight line to follow in order to wind your way out of grief.

Grief is uncharted.

C.S. Lewis writes that sorrow "needs not a map but a history" (p. 46, A Grief Observed) and I think he's correct. These posts the last several months have been an attempt at crafting a history, to chronicle what I most needed to say and in turn to learn and unlearn what moves me, what frightens me, and what loss feels like. I wanted to know the stink of it. Enduring is cheap and yet tonight enduring is all I can muster. That's the way it is. I know these feelings won't kill me, but the discomfort is significant. I'm reminded how Rob's death has tainted Devon and me, enlightened us, shifted what we think about at home. Earlier tonight while driving with Devon he told me that I study grief.

You study grief and yet no amount of studying will help you overcome it. You have to go through it, my son tells me. 

Is that how you see grief? I ask. 

Yeah. You want to place it under a microscope and find what it is made of.     

I do, I say laughing. If only it could be that easy. I found that book about the stages of  grief to be less than true.   

Stages make no sense, Devon adds. That's far too linear. 

The stages were ones I watched your dad move through during the last three weeks of his life.  But I agree that they make little sense for those surviving the death. 

It's a process we go through.

The one thing I try to remember is that my grief, my sense of loss, is not yours. It's just not the same. I'm not saying that my grief is more profound or more difficult. There's no contest when it comes to sorrow. We each hurt. What I am saying is that the loss is different and trying to understand this immense sorrow helps me to place it in perspective. I write and make art out of necessity. Making things seems to be healing me.   Does that make sense?   

Yeah, it does. Like I said it's a process. After dad's death I realized that I don't fear death. I don't at all. 

How come? I asked, truly interested. 

Death is the one thing we can know with certainty. There's no doubt how we will end. 

Hmm, I hadn't thought of it as that.

You will die. I will die, too, adds Devon. There's nothing to fear given the certainty. It is the one thing we can know for  sure.    

That's true, I tell him thinking how this last year has given rise to a more reflective young man. And I wonder as we drive if the weight of such knowledge at 17 is a weight too heavy to bear.

The one certainty in life is death, my son tells me. And certainty is a comfort. There's no confusion. We can live bolder, make our lives matter more.

Take chances and know risks?

Do what you love. 

II.

For the last several days I have drifted in and out of thoughts about Rob. I can't seem to shake loose this melancholy that dogs my steps as we approach August 20th. That was the day we learned Rob had cancer last year. Unlike so many cases of cancer, the patient goes on to live relatively normal fro several months,my ears. For Rob, he had just 6 days. By that next week, he was undertaking the first of five surgeries. This one would take 7 hours and land him in Intensive Care. He would come home for. The hospital, five days later and require oxygen for the next two weeks.  Our lives began to unravel faster and faster and we were never able to gain a foot hold.

I dread the 20th. I'm not sure why. It's not like something worse is going to happen, but perhaps I fear that as well.

Now, I stumble through life wearing a tattered quilt made from ill-sewn pieces of cloth. I gather it about me,  to keep the coolness of evening from my shoulders now that you are gone and can no longer warm me.


III.

Naomi Shihab Nye opens the poem, Kindness, by writing:

Before you know what kindness really is 

you must lose things, 

feel the future dissolve in a moment 

like salt in a weakened broth.

And I think she is right. It is sorrow that allows kindness to be noticed, wanted, desired beyond the mere benefits that accompany such acts. I know this now in ways a year ago I simply could not recognize.

J

Photo by Rajah Bose/Gonzaga University

"KINDNESS"

by Naomi Shihab Nye

#SOL16: We Were Never Lost

L: my family, C: My dad with Devon, R: Rob and Devon

I. 

I woke up this morning dragged from a dream I was having about fatherhood. Yes, an odd dream at that. I was talking in the dream and it was summer and sunny and yet, still cool as it is in the early morning. I was speaking about what being a father means--how I learned some of this by watching Rob with Devon, some of it by being the daughter of another Robert, my dad.

Fathering isn't a simple act for it defies the boundaries of time. It continues on even after our fathers die.

Years from now, Rob's actions, more than his words, will inform my son's life. His actions will take on new meaning as Devon matures.  Like I recall doing when Devon entered out lives, my thoughts about my mom changed, deepened as I could see her love in new ways that only motherhood could allow. I wish that for Dev.

II. 

Later in the morning I am reading a recent letter by Bonnie and she is relaying a time when she and her beloved husband, Tuvia, were visiting a friend's new farm. Tuvia thought they were lost and Bonnie writes--more for the present moment than the past I suspect--"We were never lost."

I stop reading as I let the last line sink in.  The words pull me back hard to earth and I realize what it means to feel my feet beneath me, feel the hardness of the ground, feel the here and now.

We were never lost. 

III.

And isn't that the center space of love--to hold in the moment the profound understanding that love anchors us? It anchors all of us and does so without effort.

I never felt lost on this planet when I was alongside Rob. Even when the road we were on literally was one we did not know, had trouble navigating, we were anchored to this earth by love.  I felt this as a child. I can recall being in Manhattan and holding on to my dad's hand as we walked down a midtown street on the West side and the towering buildings, the shuffle of people alongside us, coming at us, and the pails and pails of garbage some spilling into the street (yes, this was Manhattan in the late 1960s) could have overwhelmed a child, but it didn't.  I was anchored to the earth, learning from my dad how to trust. 

The world is mostly good his hand holding mine taught. I learned early that fear is more the absence of love than anything else. A father's love is a grand gift that we carry across the steps we make.

And isn't that sense of centeredness at the heart of what my son carries with him now?  He has been truly loved by his dad and perhaps that is what Devon was telling me a month ago when he said that we carry Rob with us--that Rob formed us. 

At first I thought that last statement was more true for him than me. For did I not come to this marriage a whole person?  But love is no mathematical proposition. It negates the logic of equivalency.  There is no equivalency in the love a father has for his child or a husband's profound love for his wife.

IV.

Rob did form us and that presence continues on. There was a consistency about my husband who had his moral compass aimed true north, much like my own dad. 

Do no harm. 
Love best what is other.
Be kind to yourself, too.
Live brilliantly. Don't hide.

No, even after Rob's death, Devon and I are never lost. 
Overwhelmed? Yes. 
But lost? No.